But of course—she was dead.
I didn’t want to go. Suddenly, desperately, I didn’t want to go. “Wait,” I said. But even as I said it, I knew I hadn’t a chance. He was sending me after her. The gurney was already rolling and the small square door shut with a soft
I panicked; my lungs filled with the sour smell of atropine and formaldehyde. I felt my mind shrink and grow manageable. My fingers in the glove felt tiny, miserable, alone until they found hers. I expected more stumps but there were only the two. I made myself quiet and waited like a lover for the sting that would—Oh! I floated free at last, toward light, and saw the dark lab and the cars on the highway like fireflies and the mountains in the distance, and I realized with a start that I was totally conscious. Why wasn’t I dead? The lattice of light parted around me like a cloud and suddenly I was standing on the Other Side, alone; no, she was beside me. She was with the Other. We drifted, the three of us, and time looped back on itself: we had always been here.
Why had I been afraid? This was so easy. We were inside the pens, which were a ring on the horizon in every direction, so many, so much stone; close enough to touch yet as far away as the stars I could barely remember… and at my feet, black still water.
Plenty of darkness but no stars on the Other Side.
I was moving. The water was still. I understood then (and I understand now) what physicists mean when they say that everything in the universe is in motion, wheeling around everything else, for I was in the black still water at the center of it all: the only thing that doesn’t move. Was it a subjective or an objective reality? The question had no significance. This was more real than anything that had ever happened to me or ever would again.
There was certainly no joy. Yet no fear. We were filled with a cold nothingness; complete. I had always been here and will be here forever. Sorel is in front of me and in front of her—the Other—and we are moving again.
Through the black water. Deeper and deeper. It is like watching myself go away and get smaller.
This is no dream. Noroguchi is going under. Sorel grows smaller, following him into the black water: and I know that there is another realm beyond this one, and other realms beyond that, and the knowing fills me with a despair as thick as fear.
And I am moving backward, alive with terror, ripping my hand from Sorel’s even as she pulls me with her; then she too is gone under.
Gone.
I reach up with both hands and touch the lid of my coffin. My hand out of the glove drips cold plasma down on my face. I am screaming soundlessly without air.
Then a shock, and warm darkness. Retrocution. When I woke up I was colder than I’d ever been. DeCandyle helped me sit up.
“No good?” He was weeping; he knew it.
“No good,” I said. My tongue was thick and tasted bad from the plasma. Sorel’s hand was still in the handbasket, and when I reached in and and pulled it out her flesh peeled off like the skin of a rotten fruit, and stuck to my fingers.
Outside, we could hear the protesters’ chants. It was Sunday morning.
That was two and a half months ago.
DeCandyle and I waited until the demonstrators left for church, and then he drove me home. “I have killed them both,” he said. Lamented. “First him and then her. With twenty years in between. Now there is no one left to forgive me.”
“They wanted it. They used you,” I said. Like they used me.
I made him let me off at the bottom of the drive. I was tired of him, sick of his self-pity, and I wanted to walk up to the studio alone. I couldn’t paint. I couldn’t sleep. I waited all day and all night, hoping irrationally to feel her cold touch on the back of my neck. Who says the dead can’t walk? I paced the floor all night. I must have fallen asleep for I had a dream in which she came to me, naked and shining and swollen and all mine. I woke up and lay listening to the sounds coming through the half-open window over my bed. It’s amazing how full of life the woods are, even in the winter. I hated it.
The next Wednesday I got a call from my ex. A woman’s body had been found at the Psy Studies Institute, and there was a chance that I would be brought in to help identify it. Dr. DeCandyle had been arrested. I might be asked to testify against him, also.
As it turned out I was never questioned. The police aren’t eager to press a blind man for an identification.
“Especially when the university is trying to hush up the whole business,” my ex said. “Especially when the body is as erratically decomposed as this one,” said her boyfriend.
“What do you mean?”
“I have a friend in the coroner’s office,” he said. “‘Erratically’ is the word he used. He said it was the most peculiar corpse he had ever seen. Some of the organs were badly decomposed and others almost fresh; it was as if the decedent had died in stages, over a period of several years.”
Cops love words like “decedent” and “corpse.” They, doctors, and lawyers are the only ones left that still speak Latin.
Sorel was buried on Friday. There was no funeral, just a brief graveside procedure so the proper papers could get signed. She was buried in the part of the cemetery set aside for amputated limbs and used medical school cadavers. It was odd mourning someone I had known better dead than alive. It felt more like a wedding; when I smelled the dirt and heard it hit the coffin lid I felt I was giving away the bride.
DeCandyle was there, handcuffed to my ex’s boyfriend. They had let him come as the next of kin.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“She was his wife,” my ex said as she led me to her cruiser so she could drive me home. “Student marriage. Separated but never divorced. I think she ran off with the Jap. The one he killed first. See how it all fits together? That’s the beauty of police work, Ray.”
The rest of the story you already know, especially if you subscribe to the
My ex and her boyfriend picked me up at the Raleigh-Durham airport when I flew back from New York. They were getting married. He had checked under the studio but found nothing. She was pregnant.
“What’s this I hear about your fingers?” my ex asked when she called last Thursday. She no longer has time to stop by; a country woman cooks for me. I explained that I had lost the tips of two fingers to what my doctor claims is the only case of frostbite in North Carolina during the exceptionally mild winter of 199-. Somehow my touch for painting has gone with them, but no one needs to know that yet.
It’s spring at last. The wet earth smells remind me of the grave and awaken in me a hunger that painting can no longer fill, even if I had my fingers. I have painted my last. My ex—excuse me, the future Mrs. William Robertson Cherry—and her boyfriend—excuse me, fiance—have assured me that they will send a driver to pick me up and bring me to the wedding next Sunday.
I may not make it, though. I have a silver shotgun behind the door that I can ride like a rocket anytime I want to.
And I hate weddings. And spring.
And envy the living.
And love the dead.
ARE THERE ANY QUESTIONS?
