remembered looking back and seeing Joey’s body huddled in the tangled shadows of the wreckage, remembered reaching toward him, desperate for the anchorage that he had always given her, and then she was on the gurney and moving.
Dusk had arrived, strangling the day, and the throttled sky hung low, as blue-black as bruises. The streetlights had come on. Gouts of red light from pulsing emergency beacons alchemized the rain from teardrops into showers of blood.
The rain was colder than it had been earlier, almost as icy as sleet. Or perhaps she was far hotter than before and felt the chill more keenly on her fevered skin. Each droplet seemed to hiss against her face, to sizzle against her hands, with which she tightly gripped her swollen abdomen as if she could deny Death the baby that it had come to collect.
As one of the two paramedics hurried to the ambulance van and scrambled into the driver’s seat, Agnes suffered another contraction so severe that for a tremulous moment, at the peak of the agony, she almost lost consciousness.
The second medic wheeled the gurney to the rear of the van, calling for one of the policemen to accompany him to the hospital. Apparently, he needed help if he was to deliver the baby and also stabilize Agnes while en route.
She only half understood their frantic conversation, partly because the ability to concentrate was draining from her along with her lifeblood, but also because she was distracted by Joey. He was no longer in the wreck, but standing at the open rear door of the ambulance.
He wasn’t torn and broken any longer. His clothes weren’t bloodstained.
Indeed, the winter storm had dampened neither his hair nor his clothes. The rain appeared to slide away from him a millimeter before contact, as though the water and the man were composed of matter and antimatter that must neither repel each other or, on contact, trigger a cataclysmic blast that would shatter the very foundation of the universe.
Joey was in his Worry Bear mode, brows furrowed, eyes pinched at the corners.
Agnes wanted to reach out and touch him, but she found that she didn’t have the strength to raise her arm. She was no longer holding her belly, either. Both hands lay at her sides, palms up, and even the simple act of curling her fingers required surprising effort and concentration.
When she tried to speak to him, she could no more easily raise her voice than she could extend a hand to him.
A policeman scrambled into the back of the van.
As the paramedic shoved the gurney across the step-notched bumper, its collapsible legs scissored down. Agnes was rolled headfirst into the ambulance.
Click-click. The wheeled stretcher locked in place.
Either operating on first-aid knowledge of his own or responding to an instruction from the medic, the cop slipped a foam pillow under Agnes’s head.
Without the pillow, she wouldn’t have been able to lift her head to look toward the back of the ambulance.
Joey was standing just outside, gazing in at her. His blue eyes were seas where sorrow sailed.
Or perhaps the sorrow was less sadness than yearning. He had to move on, but he was loath to begin this strange journey without her.
As the storm failed to dampen Joey, so the rotating red-and-white beacons on the surrounding police vehicles did not touch him. The falling raindrops were diamonds and then rubies, diamonds and then rubies, but Joey was not illuminated by the light of this world. Agnes realized that he was translucent, his skin like fine milk glass through which shone a light from Elsewhere.
The paramedic pulled shut the door, leaving Joey outside in the night, in the storm, in the wind between worlds.
With a jolt, the ambulance shifted gears, and they were rolling.
Great hobnailed wheels of pain turned through Agnes, driving her into darkness for a moment.
When pale light came to her eyes again, she heard the paramedic and the cop talking anxiously as they worked on her, but she couldn’t understand their words. They seemed to be speaking not just a foreign tongue but an ancient language unheard on earth for a thousand years.
Embarrassment flushed her when she realized that the paramedic had cut away the pants of her jogging suit. She was naked from the waist down.
Into her fevered mind came an image of a milk-glass infant, as translucent as Joey at the back door of the ambulance. Fearing that this vision meant her child would be stillborn, she said, My baby, but no sound escaped her.
Pain again, but not a mere contraction. Such an excruciation. Unendurable. The hobnailed wheels ground through her once more, as though she were being broken on a medieval torture device.
She could see the two men talking, their rain-wet faces serious and scarred with worry, but she was no longer able to hear their voices.
In fact, she could hear nothing at all: not the shrieking siren, not the hum of the tires, not the click-tick-rattle of the equipment packed into the storage shelves and the cabinets to the right of her. She was as deaf as the dead.
Instead of falling down, down into another brief darkness, as she expected, Agnes found herself drifting up. A frightening sense of weightlessness overcame her.
She had never thought of herself as being tied to her body, as being knotted to bone and muscle, but now she felt tethers snapping. Suddenly she was buoyant, unrestrained, floating up from the padded stretcher, until she was looking down on her body from the ceiling of the ambulance.
Acute terror suffused her, a humbling perception that she was a fragile construct, something less substantial than mist, small and weak and helpless. She was filled with the panicky apprehension that she would be diffused like the molecules of a scent, dispersed into such a vast volume of air that she would cease to exist.
Her fear was fed, too, by the sight of the blood that saturated the padding of the stretcher on which her body lay. So much blood. Oceans.
Into the eerie hush came a voice. No other sound. No siren. No hum or swish of tires on rain-washed pavement. Only the voice of the paramedic: “Her heart’s stopped.”
Far below Agnes, down there in the land of the living, light glimmered along the barrel of a hypodermic syringe in the hand of the paramedic, glinted from the tip of the needle.
The cop had unzipped the top of her jogging suit and pulled up the roomy T-shirt she wore under it, exposing her breasts.
The paramedic put aside the needle, having used it, and grabbed the paddles of a defibrillator.
Agnes wanted to tell them that all their efforts would be to no avail, that they should cease and desist, be kind and let her go. She had no reason to stay here anymore. She was moving on to be with her dead husband and her dead baby, moving on to a place where there was no pain, where no one was as poor as Maria Elena Gonzalez, where no one lived with fear like her brothers Edom and Jacob, where everyone spoke a single language and had all the blueberry pies they needed.
She embraced the darkness.
Chapter 13
AFTER DR. PARKHURST departed, a silence lay on the hospital room, heavier and colder than the ice bags that were draped across Junior’s midsection.
After a while, he dared to crack his eyelids. Pressing against his eyes was a blackness as smooth and as unrelenting as any known by a blind man. Not even a ghost of light haunted the night beyond the window, and the slats of the venetian blind were as hidden from view as the meatless ribs under Death’s voluminous black robe.
From the corner armchair, as if he could see so well in the dark that he knew Junior’s eyes were open, Detective Thomas Vanadium said, “Did you hear my entire conversation with Dr. Parkhurst?”
Junior’s heart knocked so hard and fast that he wouldn’t have been surprised if Vanadium, at the far end of the room, had begun to tap his foot in time with it.
Although Junior had not answered, Vanadium said, “Yes, I thought you heard it.”
A trickster, this detective. Full of taunts and feints and sly stratagems. Psychological-warfare artist.
Perhaps a lot of suspects were rattled and ultimately unnerved by th
is behavior. Junior wouldn’t be easily trapped. He was smart.
Applying his intelligence now, he employed simple meditation techniques to calm himself and to slow his heartbeat. The cop was trying to rattle him into making a mistake, but calm men did not incriminate themselves.
“What was it like, Enoch? Did you look into her eyes when you pushed her?” Vanadium’s uninflected monologue was like the voice of a conscience that preferred to torture by droning rather than by nagging. “Or doesn’t a woman-killing coward like you have the guts for that?”
Pan-faced, double-chinned, half-bald, puke-collecting asshole, Junior thought.
No. Wrong attitude. Be calm. Be indifferent to insult.
“Did you wait until her back was turned, too gutless even to meet her eyes?”
This was pathetic. Only thickheaded fools, unschooled and unworldly, would be shaken into confession by ham-handed tactics like these.
Junior was educated. He wasn’t merely a masseur with a fancy title; he had earned a full bachelor of science degree with a major in rehabilitation therapy. When he watched television, which he never did to excess, he rarely settled for frivolous game shows or sitcoms like Gomer Pyle or The Beverly Hillbillies, or even I Dream of Jeannie, but committed himself to serious dramas that required intellectual involvement—Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and The Fugitive. He preferred Scrabble to all other board games, because it expanded one’s vocabulary. As a member in good standing of the Book-of-the-Month Club, he’d already acquired nearly thirty volumes of the finest in contemporary literature, and thus far he’d read or skim-read more than six of them. He would have read all of them if he had not been a busy man with such varied interests; his cultural aspirations were greater than the time he was able to devote to them.
Vanadium said, “Do you know who I am, Enoch?”
Thomas Big Butt Vanadium.
“Do you know what I am?”
Pimple on the ass of humanity.
“No,” said Vanadium, “you only think you know who I am and what I am, but you don’t know anything. That’s all right. You’ll learn.”
This guy was spooky. Junior was beginning to think that the detective’s unorthodox behavior wasn’t a carefully crafted strategy, as it had first seemed, but that Vanadium was a little wacky.
Whether the cop was unhinged or not, Junior had nothing to gain by talking to him, especially in this disorienting darkness. He was exhausted, achy, with a sore throat, and he couldn’t trust himself to be as self-controlled as he would need to be in any interrogation conducted by this brush-cut, thick-necked toad.
He stopped straining to see through the black room to the corner armchair. He closed his eyes and tried to lull himself to sleep by summoning into his mind’s eye a lovely but calculatedly monotonous scene of gentle waves breaking on a moonlit shore.
This was a relaxation technique that had worked often before. He had learned it from a brilliant book, How to Have a Healthier Life through Autohypnosis.
Junior Cain was committed to continuous self-improvement. He believed in the need constantly to expand his knowledge and horizons in order to better understand himself and the world. The quality of one’s life was solely the responsibility of oneself.
The author of How to Have a Healthier Life through Autohypnosis was Dr. Caesar Zedd, a renowned psychologist and best-selling author of a dozen self-help texts, all of which Junior owned in addition to the literature that he had acquired from the book club. When he had been only fourteen, he’d begun buying Dr. Zedd’s titles in paperback, and by the time he was eighteen, when he could afford to do so, he’d replaced the paperbacks with hardcovers and thereafter bought all the doctor’s new books in the higher-priced editions.
The collected works of Zedd constituted the most thoughtful, most rewarding, most reliable guide to life to be found anywhere. When Junior was confused or troubled, he turned to Caesar Zedd and never failed to find enlightenment, guidance. When he was happy, he found in Zedd the welcome reassurance that it was all right to be successful and to love oneself.
Dr. Zedd’s death, just last Thanksgiving, had been a blow to Junior, a loss to the nation, to the entire world. He considered it a tragedy equal to the Kennedy assassination one year previous.
And like John Kennedy’s death, Zedd’s passing was cloaked in mystery, inspiring widespread suspicion of conspiracy. Only a few believed that he had committed suicide, and Junior was certainly not one of those gullible fools. Caesar Zedd, author of You Have a Right to Be Happy, would never have blown his brains out with a shotgun, as the authorities preferred the public to believe.
“Would you pretend to wake up if I tried to smother you?” asked Detective Vanadium.
The voice had come not from the armchair in the corner, but from immediately beside the bed.
If Junior had not been so deeply relaxed by the soothing waves breaking on the moonlit beach in his mind, he might have cried out in surprise, might have bolted upright in bed, betraying himself and confirming Vanadium’s suspicion that he was conscious.
He hadn’t heard the cop get out of the chair and cross the dark room. Difficult to believe that any man with such a hard gut slung over his belt, with a bull neck folded over his too-tight shirt collar, and with a second chin more prominent than the first could be capable of such supernatural stealth.
“I could introduce a bubble of air into your IV needle,” the detective said quietly, “kill you with an embolism, and they would never know.”
Lunatic. No doubt about it now: Thomas Vanadium was crazier than old Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate, the teenage thrill killers who had murdered eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming a few years back.
Something was going wrong in America lately. The country wasn’t level and steady anymore. It was tipped. This society was slowly sliding toward an abyss. First, teenage thrill killers. Now maniac cops. Worse to come, no doubt. Once a decline set in, halting or reversing the negative momentum was difficult if not impossible.
Tink.
The sound was odd, but Junior was almost able to identify it.
Tink.
Whatever the source of the noise, he was sure Vanadium was the cause of it.
Tink.
Ah. Yes, he knew the source. The detective was snapping one finger against the bottle of solution that was suspended from the IV rack beside the bed.
Tink.
Although Junior had no hope of sleep now, he concentrated on the calming mental image of gentle waves foaming on moonlit sand. It was a relaxation technique, not just a sleep aid, and he rather desperately needed to stay relaxed.
TINK! A harder, sharper snap with the fingernail.
Not enough people took self-improvement seriously. The human animal harbored a terrible destructive impulse that must always be resisted.
TINK!
When people didn’t apply themselves to positive goals, to making better lives for themselves, they spent their energy in wickedness. Then you got Starkweather, killing all those people with no hope of personal gain. You got maniac cops and this new war in Vietnam.
Tink: Junior anticipated the sound, but it didn’t come.
He lay in tense expectation.
The moonlight had faded and the gentle waves had ebbed out of his mind’s eye. He concentrated, trying to force the phantom sea to flow back into view, but this was one of those rare occasions when a Zedd technique failed him.
Instead, he imagined Vanadium’s blunt fingers moving over the intravenous apparatus with surprising delicacy, reading the function of the equipment as a blind man would read Braille with swift, sure, gliding fingertips. He imagined the detective finding the injection port in the main drip line, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. Saw him produce a hypodermic needle as a magician would pluck a silk scarf from the ether. Nothing in the syringe except deadly air. The needle sliding into the port…
Junior wanted to scream for help, but he dared not.
He didn’t even dare to pretend to wake u
p now, with a mutter and a yawn, because the detective would know that he was faking, that he had been awake all along. And if he’d been feigning unconsciousness, eavesdropping on the conversation between Dr. Parkhurst and Vanadium, and later failing to respond to Vanadium’s pointed accusations, his deception would inevitably be read as an admission of guilt in the murder of his wife. Then this idiot gumshoe would be indefatigable, relentless.
As long as Junior continued to fake sleep, the cop couldn’t be absolutely sure that any deception was taking place. He might suspect, but he couldn’t know. He would be left with at least a shred of doubt about Junior’s guilt.
After an interminable silence, the detective said, “Do you know what I believe about life, Enoch?”
One stupid damn thing or another.
“I believe the universe is sort of like an unimaginably vast musical instrument with an infinite number of strings.”
Right, the universe is a great big enormous ukulele.
The previously flat, monotonous voice had in it now a subtle but undeniable new roundness of tone: “And every human being, every living thing, is a string on that instrument.”
And God has four hundred billion billion fingers, and He plays a really hot version of “Hawaiian Holiday.”
“The decisions each of us makes and the acts that he commits are like vibrations passing through a guitar string.”
In your case a violin, and the tune is the theme from Psycho.
The quiet passion in Vanadium’s voice was genuine, expressed with reason but not fervor, not in the least sentimental or unctuous—which made it more disturbing. “Vibrations in one string set up soft, sympathetic vibrations in all the other strings, through the entire body of the instrument.”
Boing.
“Sometimes these sympathetic vibrations are very apparent, but a lot of the time, they’re so subtle that you can hear them only if you’re unusually perceptive.”
Good grief, shoot me now and spare me the misery of listening to this.
“When you cut Naomi’s string, you put an end to the effects that her music would have on the lives of others and on the shape of the future. You struck a discord that can be heard, however faintly, all the way to the farthest end of the universe.”
If you’re trying to push me into another puke-athon, this is likely to work.
“That discord sets up lots of other vibrations, some of which will return to you in ways you might expect—and some in ways you could never see coming. Of the things you couldn’t have seen coming, I’m the worst.”
In spite of the bravado of the responses in Junior’s unspoken half of the conversation, he was increasingly unnerved by Vanadium. The cop was a lunatic, all right, but he was something more than a mere nut case.
“I was once doubting Thomas,” said the detective, but not from beside the bed any longer. His voice seemed to come from across the room, perhaps near the door, though he had made not a sound as he’d moved.
In spite of his dumpy appearance—and especially in the dark, where appearances didn’t count—Vanadium had the aura of a mystic. Although Junior didn’t believe in mystics or in the various unearthly powers they claimed to possess, he knew that mystics who believed in themselves were exceptionally dangerous people.
The detective was driven by this string theory of his, and maybe he also saw visions or even heard voices, like Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc without beauty or grace, Joan of Arc with a service revolver and the authority to use it. The cop was no threat to the English army, as Joan had been, but as far as Junior was concerned, the creep most definitely deserved to be burned at the stake.
“Now, I’m doubtless,” Vanadium said, his voice returning to the uninflected drone that Junior had come to loathe but that he now preferred to the unsettling voice of quiet passion. “No matter what the situation, no matter how knotty the question, I always know what to do. And I certainly know what to do about you.”
Weirder and weirder.
“I’ve put my hand in the wound.”
What wound? Junior wanted to ask, but he recognized bait when he heard it, and he did not bite.
After a silence, Vanadium opened the door to the corridor.
Junior hoped that he hadn’t been betrayed by eyeshine in the fraction of a second before he closed his eyes to slits.
A mere silhouette against the fluorescent glare, Vanadium stepped into the hall. The bright light seemed to enfold him. The detective shimmered and vanished the way that a mirage of a man, on a fiercely hot desert highway, will appear to walk out of this dimension into another, slipping between the tremulous curtains of heat as though they hang between realities. The door swung shut.
Chapter 14
SEVERE THIRST INDICATED to Agnes that she wasn’t dead. There would be no thirst in paradise.
Of course, she might be making an erroneous assumption about her sentence at Judgment. Thirst would likely afflict the legions of Hell, a fierce, never-ending thirst, made worse by meals consisting of salt and sulfur and ashes, nary a