Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

He’d touched so many, he had calluses on his hands as well as within his body.

  Paul doubled over in a sudden spasm, the weight of the backpack tipping him onto the ground. In a flurry of fresh snow, he tumbled to the bottom of a broad depression. On his back, staring into the heart of the snowstorm, listening to traffic in slush, he lay convulsing for moments until the seizure passed. Then climbed back to the highway. Snow and ice caking eyebrows, hair, beard.

  He pushed on.

  Living this way was easier when its reasons were clearly defined, reduced to simple cause-and-effect. He’d explained it to himself so that it made acceptable sense: He was no longer playing this game by its ancient rules even though he knew them now. Throwing the balance further out of whack with every healing he performed, while refusing to bow to the other side’s demands. It was a life out of balance, and so the fulcrum suffered most of all. And while the infernal chessmaster who had tagged him with this in the first place could wrack his body with pain, Paul took satisfaction in believing it did so only because it could no longer touch his soul.

  True or not, he took comfort like that wherever he could find it.

  The comforts of nostalgia still lay ahead, a city he’d once known and loved. Why he had returned, he couldn’t say, only knowing that it seemed right, instinctual. So he obeyed.

  Trudging onward, against snow and ice and wind, leaving I-70 and walking south until he found a Burger King, deciding to go in for a bite of breakfast. He sorted through a fistful of change scrounged here, panhandled there, coming up with enough for an egg and cheese croissant and orange juice. The first hot thing he had eaten in a week.

  And he enjoyed it fully, a small fleeting gift. Alone and anonymous, drawing a few stares of disgust from other patrons who saw only one more roadbum, one more transient who’d slipped through society’s fingers and was someone else’s problem. Such granite eyes no longer hurt; he knew what he looked like. The clothes. The hair that hadn’t been cut since September. The untrimmed beard. All of which needed a good washing, perhaps a good burning.

  He slapped his remaining cash worth onto the tabletop. Thirty-eight cents, not a lot he could do with that. So he earmarked the quarter and looked at a clock visible in the kitchen, found there was still time. At a pay phone near the rest rooms he punched in a number he would never forget, hoping the staff at the other end hadn’t changed since he’d left town.

  “KGRM request line,” and yes, the voice was tenor, familiar, a friendly nectar.

  “I’ve still got this question no one’s ever answered. Can you play air guitar in a vacuum?”

  Silence, six or seven seconds, except for the musical background bleedthrough. Then, “Paul?”

  “Who else wonders about stupid things like that?”

  A cry of jubilation, “Paul! Holy shit! I thought you were dead, I really did,” and then Peter Hargrove’s voice cracked, and he recovered with a cough, a relieved gale of laughter, men don’t cry. He let loose with a cascade of disbelief and celebration. Finally, “Where are you, are you in town?”

  “Yeah, I’m out in West County, just came in off I-70.” Paul gritted his teeth as another spasm wracked him up one side and down the other. For every joy a thorn, it seemed. He gripped the top of the phone carrel, let himself hang against the wall until the tension pulled him through the worst of the cramps. “I’m, uh…” Trailing off, tremors riding his voice as he tasted the sour tang of pain. “…just passing through … and wanted to see how everybody was doing.”

  “You don’t sound so good, are you feeling okay?”

  Paul deep-breathed a moment. Sometimes it helped. “I’m okay. Little touch of the flu is all.”

  “‘Tis the season. Take care of yourself. So when do we get together, huh? Can you make it by the station today?”

  “I wish I could, I doubt it, not today. Maybe tomorrow?” Lies, lies, but he had no courage to say never. Not that strong inside yet, and to get past it, he prompted that update on KGRM personnel past and present.

  So he listened, Peter Hargrove covering one and all, a case-by-case progression. Who had left, who was still there. Latest rumors, who had made life changes. And Paul listened with an expression that began as a smile, slowly folding inward, a pained grimace as his eyes slid closed and began a silent spill of tears. Clinging in his beard, trickling toward his mouth, until he could taste his mourning of the unattainability of these lives, this lifestyle. The past, glimpsing memories through the glass darkly, never to be touched again. Wanting so much to be a part of it that it felt like a physical weight.

  But he dared not visit the station, see Peter, any of them. Cross the line, and the temptation to stay would be too great. And he couldn’t subject them to any possible harm, ever. A day would eventually come when his guard would drop, when defenses would be slack, when tempers would flare before he knew it.

  Any risk was too great.

  Temper was best contained out here in the desolation, living as a wandering hermit, as devout Hindus often did toward the end of their lives. The solitude had never seemed quite so overwhelming until hearing this voice he loved. It all came home with an impact to crush the heart.

  Until he realized that Peter’s update was incomplete.

  “What about Lorraine?” he said. “You didn’t tell me about Lorraine.”

  “Yeah. Her.” Peter was stalling, he could tell. “Well, things have changed a lot for Lorraine. I mean, it’s good for you, if you’ve still got those same old feelings.”

  Paul gripped the phone harder, knowing he should hang up, hang up now, temptation blooming sweet and deadly.

  “She’s single again. Lorraine and Craig called it a marriage, and that was that. Things weren’t that great back when you were here, you know, and they were trying to have a kid. Well, they found out she can’t, her ovaries don’t work right. You believe it, fertile-looking thing like her? So it was the last straw for Craig. The man wants heirs, blood relatives.” Peter made a low noise, from the throat. “I’m not the world’s most sensitive guy, I’ve been told that more than once. But I’ll tell you, I really wanted to take that shithead off at the neck for what that did to her.”

  “She’s better off,” Paul whispered, leaning heavily against the wall. “Where’s she living now?”

  “Some apartment in the Central West End.”

  Nodding to himself, while slowly, quietly, a germ of an idea began to form. Origin unclear, like some ancient desert treasure uncovered by a random breath of wind. Maybe, just maybe, here might be a chance for happiness after all.

  “What’s the address? Maybe I can surprise her with a visit.”

  “That’s the conqueror spirit. Hang on, let me go check the Rolodex on Sherry’s desk.” A couple minutes of limbo on hold, then Peter returned with the street and number.

  Paul said sure, he knew where that would be, then wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his hand. “Do me a favor? Could you keep quiet about me calling, for now? I’d like it to be a surprise when I show up.”

  “Too late, I already let it slip to Sherry. She squealed, man, she can’t wait to see you again. But maybe I can get her to keep it our secret.”

  Speaking a little longer, and when the time came to say goodbye, Paul knew it. Each word bringing them to the close of this final conversation twisted the knife that much deeper. Barely keeping his voice intact, thinking, Have a great life. Be happy.

  Hanging up the phone felt like the slam of a vault that could never be reopened, and what price to make this hurt go away?

  He abandoned the warm, soulless Burger King for the outside, moisture freezing into a glaze across his cheeks. He walked. Walked. Walked. Until his feet felt like blocks of ice, with more to go.

  It was a curse, this need for contact with these people who’d once helped define his life. Any human contact that would last more than a second, a minute, an hour. Why do this to himself, why do it to them? He had been stronger where his mother was concerned. Always stopping short any
of the hundred times he had thought to pick up the phone, hear her voice, surprise her with his own. Maybe, in the end, he loved her most of all, in his convoluted way. She would already have mourned her son, just as she had, with his help more than half his life ago, mourned her husband. Why raise her hopes for a few minutes, only to turn around and give her cause to mourn his exile from the rest of her life?

  Let sleeping dogs lie, and dead sons remain cold.

  He made it to Lorraine’s new home by early afternoon. On a street of many trees, cars lining the curb, some trapped by levees of plowed snow. It was a big old graystone fortress of a building, with gables and heavy balconies, wonderfully personable architecture that you never saw new anymore. Tall windows grew icicle teeth, and caps of snow crowned every nonvertical surface. It looked warm and inviting, and he found her apartment on the third floor.

  When she answered his leaden knock, Lorraine hung in the doorway with paralysis. She spent a long moment searching for his identity, the recognition delayed by his beard, but there was no mistaking the eyes. And hers went suddenly misty.

  “Oh you,” she said with cracking voice, and squeezed him, parka, snow, ice, and all. Through the coat’s bulky arms he could feel her quivering. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated,” he said, and found that, at least for the moment, he could laugh. Until her searching face crackled through the frozen crust of his beard and sought his mouth. Her own so warm, at once so fierce and tender.

  “Get in here. You’re a Popsicle,” seizing him by the wrist to pull him inside, kicking the door shut.

  Paul let his backpack slip to the floor, shrugged his coat off atop it, just in time for another spasm to clench into him, and he joined his things on the rug. And Lorraine was calling his name, dropping to her knees beside him, “Are you okay, are you okay?”

  He coughed it into submission past ribs that felt reduced to tent stakes. “I just slipped.” Lying through a forced smile, nothing wrong here. “My feet are cold, I can’t feel them too well.”

  She got him moved into the living room, and he sagged onto the sofa. She had high ceilings, he’d just known she would from out there, and as he gazed upward, the ceiling seemed to go on forever. A flat cathedral, sanctuary for the wayfarer.

  “Are you hungry? Can I fix you something to eat? Get something to drink?” She leaned in across to him, one hand on his leg. It looked creamy, lightly veined, and he patted it with his own hand, as pale and chilly as a corpse.

  “I just want to look at you for a minute.” And look he did, drinking in every nuance, every subtlety of curve and crease and fold, everything about her he’d missed or forgotten, and whose recall served only to endear her deeper the longer he stared. The untamed golden hair. The face that had lost its tan for winter, but looked equally lovely pale, in a more haunting way. The green eyes. And, beneath corduroy slacks and a cableknit sweater, the smoothly graceful body whose comforts he had known just once.

  “I suppose you talked to Peter,” she said. “That’s how you knew?”

  He nodded. His hair and beard had begun to thaw, dripping chilly runoff down his face, onto his neck and hands, into his shirt. “He told me everything. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well,” trying to flip it all aside with a cavalier laugh, obviously fake. Her eyes reflected tombstones, carved with the names of unconceived children. “I guess some of us weren’t cut out to work with the little teeny people of the world.” A wobbly smile, more honest. “Maybe someday I’ll quit coming unglued every time a Pampers commercial comes on TV.”

  He almost said it, You can always adopt, but stopped himself. She would have heard it too often, knowing rationally, yes, that option was always there, the wellspring of nurturing love need not dry, but there would always be some itch left unscratched.

  Lorraine was doing some staring of her own. Tombstones reflected in his own eyes? “What did they do to you in that church, Paul? Why did they kill that girl? I saw pictures, I saw film from that morning, and it looked like you holding her at the end, and then again it didn’t, but I knew it had to be you. What did they do to you to make you look that way?”

  He shook his head, shivering as more water trickled into his clothing. “It doesn’t matter anymore. None of it. The only thing that does matter is that it’s behind me. That’s all.”

  She leaned over for a hug, but he gently pushed her back for the moment. Now was not the time. Feeling tears welling up, forcing them down.

  “Did you ever regret your whole life?” he asked in a broken voice. “Ever regret you’d even been born at all?” When he got no answer, only an uncomprehending stare, he went on. “That’s where I’ve been living for a long time. I didn’t want it to be that way, I … just wanted to be … ordinary. But … the luck of the draw, I guess. You know, it’s so terrifying to me how little choice we sometimes have in our lives.”

  No rebuttals, no questions, just her need, and his own. So at last he allowed the hug. To wait any longer would be to risk yielding to the temptation of deluding himself that he could live normally. It would be so easy to stay, to warm and dry himself, to wait for her return from work this evening so they could make love all night, and then to sleep, and wake up tomorrow and repeat the cycle. So easy.

  And so out of the question.

  That wasn’t why he had come here.

  So he allowed the hug, pulling her close to run his warming hands up beneath her sweater, feeling the bra strap beneath his fingers as he splayed his hands across her bare back. He ran them down the tapered sides to her waist, encircling the firmly rounded muscle. All the better for surefire, no-miss contact. Even defective ovaries couldn’t hide from him.

  Feeling something quietly snap inside him, a deep sense of wrongdoing, like the willful violation of ancient taboo, he could have wept, but now for joy. Because this healing had been a two-way exchange like none other.

  Paul drew back from her, kissed her one last, intense time, bless these lips, these eyes, this heart.

  “Where’s your bathroom?”

  Lorraine pointed down a hallway, then got up to show him, eyes cast in a wary sideways glance, as if intuiting that something was amiss but unable to put her finger on it. Oh, she was sharp. She would make a fine mother.

  He lingered in the doorway, hand on the knob to hold himself upright, treating himself to a few moments of final luxury with the sight of her face. He had to make this one good, make it count … for it would be the one to sustain him through an eternity.

  And then he shut the door.

  Barely in time, the door latching as he collapsed to the floor, muscle control going as if down an open drain. Sprawled between the vanity and the tub, Paul stretched himself out so he was at least less awkward, and relaxed only when her footsteps sounded down the hall.

  Smiling faintly, he wondered whom she would love someday, and, having resigned herself to the belief that birth control would never be necessary, how she would feel upon leaving a doctor’s office after a pregnancy test with positive results. A revelation he hoped she would regard as the happiest of accidents.

  He wondered, too, what the child would look like. What it would accomplish. If he would discover a cure for cancer; if she would be the nation’s first woman president. Or if Lorraine’s child would simply live the life of quiet satisfaction that he had found so elusive. All were noble pursuits. He just wished he could watch it grow.

  Perhaps, where he was going, he could.

  Which was hopeful thinking at its idealistic worst, he knew that. For the next moments were going to be stupefying in their magnitude of the unknown.

  He hoped she could someday forgive him for choosing her bathroom for this. But to die before her eyes was unthinkable.

  Strange. In all those he had healed, on his own and through the ministry, before and after, not once had he come up against a case of female infertility. Which was much less a disease or injury than an alternative
state of existence. In a small, simple way, maybe he’d been saving the best for last.

  The coup de grace. Violator of taboo, healer of a barren woman. Let this ancient lineage whose spirit he carried at last die out, without a successor.

  Paul reached forward, fueled by the flames of unfulfilled dreams he bequeathed to some other man, and pressed a hand to her bathroom door. As if Lorraine, on the other side, were doing likewise. Two loves separated by a prison of divergent lives.

  “I’ll leave a light burning for you,” he whispered. “But don’t hurry.”

  Strange, too, to think that after all the self-inflicted violence by gun and blade, attempted starvation, subzero cold and worse, that the goal he had sought all along would be achieved by the restoration of the ability to bring forth new life.

  Bittersweet was a flavor he could live with. Die with.

  But its price, oh, what a price…

  He considered it a bargain.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3