The witching hour

put them in the ashtray, and then he set them afire with a match.

Two

NINE P.M. THE room was dark, save for the bluish light of the television. Miss Havisham, was it not, a wraith in a wedding dress from his beloved Great Expectations.

Through the clear, unadorned windows he could see the lights of downtown San Francisco when he chose to look-a constellation burning through the thin fog, and just below, the peaked roofs of the smaller Queen Anne houses across Liberty Street. How he loved Liberty Street. His house was the tallest on the block, a mansion once perhaps, now only a beautiful house, rising majestically among humbler cottages, above the noise and the bustle of the Castro.

He had “restored” this house. He knew every nail, every beam, every cornice. Shirtless in the sun, he had laid the tiles of the roof. He had even poured the concrete of the sidewalk.

Now he felt safe in his house, and safe nowhere else. And for four weeks he had not been out of this room, except to enter the small adjacent bathroom.

Hour by hour, he lay in bed, hands hot inside the black leather gloves which he could not and would not take off, staring at the ghostly black-and-white television screen in front of him. He was letting the television shape his dreams through the various videotapes he loved, the videotapes of the movies he’d watched years ago with his mother. They were “the house movies” to him now, because all of them had not only wonderful stories and wonderful people who had become his heroes and heroines, but wonderful houses. Rebecca had Manderley. Great Expectations had Miss Havisham’s ruined mansion. Gaslight had the lovely London town house on the square. The Red Shoes had the mansion by the sea where the lovely dancer went to hear the news that she would soon be the company’s prima ballerina.

Yes, the house movies, the movies of childhood dreams, of characters as great as the houses. He drank beer after beer as he watched. He drifted in and out of sleep. His hands positively hurt in the gloves. He did not answer the phone. He did not answer the door. Aunt Vivian took care of it.

Now and then Aunt Vivian would come into his room. She would give him another beer, or some food. He rarely ate the food. “Michael, please eat,” she would say. He would smile. “Later, Aunt Viv.”

He would not see or speak to anyone except Dr. Morris, but Dr. Morris couldn’t help him. His friends couldn’t help him either. And they didn’t want to talk to him anymore. They were tired of hearing him talk about being dead for an hour and then coming back. And he certainly did not want to talk to the hundreds who wanted to see a demonstration of his psychic power.

He was sick to death of his psychic power. Didn’t anyone understand? It was a parlor trick, this taking off his gloves and touching things and seeing some simple, mundane image. “You got this pencil from a woman in your office yesterday. Her name’s Gert,” or “This locket. This morning, you took it out and you decided you’d wear it but you didn’t really want to. You wanted to wear the pearls, and you couldn’t find them.”

Just a physical thing, this, an antenna that maybe all human beings had thousands of years ago.

Didn’t anyone appreciate the real tragedy? That he could not remember what he saw when he was drowned. “Aunt Viv,” he would say, still trying now and then to explain it to her, “I really did see people up there. We were dead. All of us were dead. And I had a choice about coming back. And I was sent back for a purpose.”

Pale shadow of his dead mother, Aunt Vivian would only nod her head. “I know, darling. Maybe in time, you’ll remember.”

In time.

His friends had gotten more harsh at the end. “Michael, you’re talking crazy. This happens that people drown and they’re brought back. There’s no special purpose.”

“That’s nuthouse talk, Mike.”

Therese had cried and cried. “Look, there’s no use me being here, Michael. You’re not the same person.”

No. Not the same person. That person drowned. Over and over he tried to remember the rescue-the woman who had got him up out of the water and brought him around. If only he could talk to her again, if only Dr. Morris would find her … He just wanted to hear it from her own lips that he’d said nothing. He just wanted to take off his gloves and hold her hand in his when he asked her. Maybe through her he could remember …

Dr. Morris wanted him to come in for further evaluation.

“Leave me alone. Just find that woman. I know you can reach her. You told me she called you. She told you her name.”

He was through with hospitals, with brain scans and electroencephalograms, through with shots and pills.

The beer he understood. He knew how to pace it. And the beer sometimes brought him close to remembering …

… And it was a realm he’d seen out there. People-so many of them. Now and then it was there again, a great gossamer whole. He saw her … who was she? She said … And then it was gone. “I will, I’ll do it. If I die again trying, I’ll do it.”

Had he really said that to them? How could he have imagined such things, things so very far afield of his own world, which was full of the solid and the real, and why these odd flashes of being far away, back home, in the city of his boyhood?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything that mattered anymore.

He knew he was Michael Curry, that he was forty-eight years old, that he had a couple of million socked away, and property that amounted to almost that, which was a very good thing because his construction company was shut down, cold. He could no longer run it. He’d lost his best carpenters and painters to the other crews around town. He’d lost the big job that had meant so much, the restoration of the old bed-and-breakfast hotel on Union Street.

He knew that if he took off his gloves and started touching anything-the walls, the floor, the beer can, the copy of David Copperfield which lay open beside him-he’d start getting these flashes of meaningless information and he’d go crazy. That is, if he wasn’t already crazy.

He knew he had been happy before he drowned, not perfectly happy, but happy. His life had been good.

The morning of the big event, he had awakened late, needing a day off, and it was a good time for it. His men were doing just fine out there, and maybe he wouldn’t check on them. It was May 1 and the oddest memory came back to him-of a long drive out of New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast to Florida when he was a boy. It must have been the Easter vacation, but he really didn’t know for sure, and all those who would have known-his mother, his father, his grandparents-were dead.

What he remembered was the clear green water on that white beach, and how warm it had been, and that the sand was like sugar under his feet.

They had all gone down to the waves to swim at sunset; not the slightest chill in the air; and though the great orange sun still hung in the blue western sky, there was a half moon shining straight overhead. His mother had pointed it out to him. “Look, Michael.” Even his father seemed to love it, his father who never noticed such things had said in a soft voice that it was a beautiful place.

It had hurt him to remember this. The cold in San Francisco was the one thing he powerfully resented, and he could never tell anyone why afterwards-that such a memory of southern warmth had inspired him to go out that day to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Was there any place colder in all of the Bay Area than Ocean Beach? He had known how drab and forbidding the water would look under the bleached and sullen sky. He had known how the wind would cut through his clothes.

Nevertheless he’d gone. Alone to be at Ocean Beach on this dim, colorless afternoon with visions of southern waters, of driving with the top down on the old Packard convertible through the soft caressing southern wind.

He didn’t turn on the car radio as he drove through town. So he didn’t hear the high tide warnings. But what if he had? He knew Ocean Beach was dangerous. Every year people were washed out, natives as well as tourists.