She stared at the phone. After a few seconds, the LCD became dim from inactivity, and her face peered back at her with the blank puzzlement of a prisoner in a cage. She pressed redial. Her home number marched across the screen, appearing digit by digit beneath the phone icon transmitting its telepathy waves.
This time Wallace answered. “Hello?”
“Wallace. What is going on?”
“Hey, Mom. Nothing. Just me and the campaigners are taking a break. What’s up?”
“Who was that man who answered our phone?”
“Man?”
“Wallace, I just called you, and a man just picked up.”
She could always tell when he was lying by the seesawing quality of his voice, as if some hidden athletic force were propelling his sentences up and then catching them as they fell back down. “I don’t know. You must have dialed the wrong number or something.”
“I pressed redial.” In the background the same deep voice that had spoken to her earlier said something like wonder who or hundred and two before the others hushed him. “Him. That man.”
Wallace paused. “Okay. Listen,” he said. “Don’t freak out. There’s this guy we met. He sells books from a blanket over by that Chinese place. Mom, I’m telling you, he had a first-edition Cities in Dust manual, still in the wooden box, with both the Twelve Nations supplement and the original Gazetteer. We’re negotiating the price down, that’s all.”
“Out! Get him out of our house!”
“Give us just a … second … more,” Wallace told her, “and we’ll be—”
She heard someone say, “All right, man. You can have that one and one other. But that’s it.”
“—almost—”
“Kendall Wallace Poggione!”
“Finished,” Wallace concluded.
“Now!”
“Okay, okay, we’re done. Jesus! Problem solved. He’s leaving.” The front door opened and closed, its damaged hinge clacking against the frame. With a cavernous sigh her son declared, “You know, Mom, just because your life frightens you doesn’t mean my life has to frighten me.”
The next day, a message came while she was sitting on her front steps. She glanced away for a moment, and there it was, nestled in the thick fringe of grass around the fissure, like a mushroom springing up after a thunderstorm. I love you, it read, and I want you to join me. I want us to be together again, my jewel, my apple. Whatever the cost, I want it, I want it. And I don’t want to wait until you die, because God knows how long that will be.
It was his longest letter yet. She sensed that every word had demanded some mysterious payment from him, a fee that could be understood only by those who had already been laid to rest. What was he asking? That she end her life? That she suspend it? Or something else altogether, something she could hardly imagine?
For the next few days he left no love notes in her yard, no entreaties, only a single question that appeared late one night on the back of a chewing gum wrapper: Hello?
He was giving her time to think. He was waiting for her belowground—she knew it, she knew it. Every day the crack by her porch grew a little larger. At first it was only a chink in the dirt, no wider than the slot where she dropped her mail at the post office, but gradually it stretched open until it was as big as an ice chest, and then a steamer trunk, and then a gulf into which she could easily have fit her entire body. She wondered what it would be like if she accepted his invitation. She began to dream that she was living beneath the field on the far side of the woods, moving through a long procession of rooms and hallways where the dead milled around like guests at a trade convention. Throughout the day, at various angles, the sun pierced the hills and the pastures, sending bright silver needles through the ceiling of the earth, so that it was never completely dark, and at night, when the land was soaked in shadows, the people around her glowed with a strange heat. She watched them flare and shimmer through their skin, their bones going off like bombs, every limb a magnificent firework of carbon, phosphorus, and calcium. It seemed that the surface of the world had two sides: on one were the bereaved spouses, the outcast teenagers, the old men and women who had no one left to reminisce with, and on the other were the lovers and friends and parents they had outlived—all of them, whether above or below, aching for those who were gone; all of them, whether above or below, pressing their fingers to the soil. Her eyes flickered in her face, and her teeth shone in her mouth, and when she woke, before the dream had lost its color, she felt that she was recalling some earlier existence, like a house she had lived in as a child, familiar down to its last curved faucet and last chipped floorboard.
The truth was that the thread connecting her to the world was as thin as could be. A sunrise here or there, the feel of suede against her skin, the aroma of strong coffee in the morning, and a few moments of forgetful well-being—that was it, that was all she had, and she knew that it could snap at any moment. She had always believed that one day someone would come along and love her and she would understand how to live. Maybe the idea was juvenile, but she had carried it with her all her life, like an ember smoldering in a pouch of green leaves. It was only the past awful year that had forced her to give it up. And now here it was again, the hope that she had finally found him, the man who would wrench her into the world, the good and beautiful world, where people got married and had children and slowly grew old together.
One afternoon, as she was standing at the kitchen counter eating a turkey-and-diced-olive sandwich, she realized that she had made up her mind. She swept the bread crumbs into her palm and brushed them gently, caressingly, into the sink, as if she were stroking a cat. Then she went outside and knelt at the edge of the crevice. Her neighbor was grilling a steak in his backyard. A forsythia bush rustled in the wind.
There she was, and then there she wasn’t, and two large, pale ants were exploring the impression her knees had left in the grass.
It was the last the world would see of her, or at least the last the sun would, the last the sky.
I am here to tell you what happened next.
In Phoenix the streets ran flat and straight, and the jacaranda blossoms made strange ghosts in the slipstreams of the cars, and even at seven, after the sun had set, when the hotel’s valet motioned one of the taxis over for her, the city was clothed with a lustrous violet sky that seemed to have the full force of the day shining inside it, and her driver asked her why she was in town, and, “No kidding. Have you ever read those Stainless Steel Rat books?” and, “Tempe Square, d’ya say?” and she kept flattening her tongue against the sleek patch where her sore had been, reassuring herself that it scarcely hurt anymore, though her tongue itself was already perforated where she had rasped it against her teeth, and it felt as if she were balancing a seed, a small bitter seed, on the tip, and she knew it would be only a day or two before the tiny pock spilled out of itself and ulcerated, but for tonight at least she was better, she was better, and the bookstore smelled of bread and coffee from the bakery next door, and there was something about the way the microphone dislocated her speech, taking her Annie Lennox contralto and the slightly too-long hiss she gave her s’s and making them gigantic, directionless, that she was still unpracticed enough to find amusing, as if she were nothing but a voice, a big spectral voice, and she could lose herself in it, forgetting all the people who sat before her with their tics and abscesses, their blisters and swollen glands, the intestinal disorders that floated in their abdomens like foxfire, the conjunctivitis infections that made their eyes gleam and shimmer, gathered in their chairs between the podium and the horror shelves, and when she reached the end of the story, someone raised his hand and asked, “What’s wrong with your people?” and then, “Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I liked that. I really did. But you write these stories about characters who have great sectors of what one would ordinarily regard as the common human experience entirely unavailable to them. I mean, they don’t seem to realize it, but they do. I’m just trying to understand why,?
?? and the only answer she could think to give was that she had spent the last four years doing exactly the same, trying to understand why, and then there arrived the usual questions about her favorite books and her writing schedule and her teaching philosophy and her cover designs, and after she was finished responding to them, when she had thanked the audience for attending and signed the bookstore’s stock, one of the managers gave her a T-shirt with the words FICTIONAL CHARACTER printed on the front, and the bandage on the inside of his arm held a single brilliant point of silver that reminded her of the picture on an old cathode ray tube, collapsing to a starlike remnant of itself as the power was switched off, and the arches along the back of the store were crowned with paintings of mountains and houses, and the gold pillars were washed in light and shadow, and she was getting ready to leave when there he came, him, striding past the magazine racks, giving her his funny, bashful, enthusiastic smile, and he said, “Two days, you told me. Well, it’s been two days. It took me almost that long to drive here. I was wondering if—” and she interrupted him by gripping his wrist and stroking it with her thumb, slowly lifting her hand free until her fingers were barely skimming the risen tips of the hairs, and she asked him if he would mind too much, too terribly much—“John. John-with-an-h Catau”—if he would mind driving her back to her hotel, and she wondered if she had lost her senses, but she felt only the slightest nettling of pressure on her lip, and all she had was this one night, and he only had to look at her to see her.
Soon after the woman went to join her fiancé, as the final sweltering days of summer came to a close, an unusual event took place. Late one night, while everyone was sleeping, something shifted beneath the brown pastures and the dry creek beds, and a hundred thousand fissures spread across the landscape, leading to a hundred thousand front doors. Shortly after the sun rose, in one house after another, the lights went on, and people showered and got dressed, and then they stepped outside to go to work. Earlier that week, a mass of clouds had been seen at the horizon, which meant that it was almost time for the rains to begin again, but this particular day had dawned hard and clear. The heat rang out like a coin. The grass twitched and straightened in the morning air. And the lawns—they were split down the center, and from every rift projected a sheet of paper:
I love that perfect little cluster of freckles on your wrist.
I love the way your hair curls when you work up a sweat.
I love how good you were to me when I got sick.
I love watching you sit at your desk, the sun shining on you through the philodendron leaves.
I love your many doomed attempts to give up caffeine.
Once there was a country where it rained for most of the year, and everyone resided underground, and no one was quite sure who was dead and who was living. But it did not matter because they were happy. And they were ever. And they were after.
Morse Putnam Strawbridge
It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds they have made.
—Franz Kafka
At first he was sure he had died. When the one with the shaved head gave him another blow to the midriff and his stomach erupted with four long shears of light, he believed he was watching his soul flee from his body. He had never been certain he had a soul, but there it went, like a flock of birds flooding through an open gate. Out it poured from the gash on his arm. Out it poured from the puncture on his thigh. Out it poured from that frog’s neck of tissue between his thumb and his forefinger, where the one with the ski jacket had nicked him with a paring knife and forced him to splay his hand open until the skin split to the muscle. So much light. What else could it have been?
Then he noticed that the one who had caught him below the knee with the tire iron was glowing from his front tooth. And the one with the shaved head was examining the scuff marks on his knuckles, foiled with drops of blood. And the smaller one, the talker, who had started things off by pushing him against the wall and saying, “Where are they, huh? Where did you hide them, buddy?” was swiping at a glinting bruise on his arm, eyeing it with aggravation and curiosity, like a cat batting at a laser pointer.
So either all of them had died or none of them had.
He decided they were still alive. Abnormal but alive. Luminescent but alive. The cars were still gunning their engines at one another. New Fun Ree was still steaming the air with its smell of noodles and battered chicken. And his wounds were still pulsing and burning. The only difference was that he could see the nerves working now, growing brighter with each burst of pain.
The one whose tooth was shining said, “What the hell is up with you guys? Have you seen yourselves?” and the others said, “Have you seen yourself?” and, “Look in a mirror, Stephen Hawking,” and, “ ‘Oh, my tooth, my tooth. Christ, fellas, I’ve gotta get to a dentist. This thing is about goddamn killing me.’ ” They traded a laugh at the impersonation. From the mouth of the alley he listened to the four of them argue: What was happening? How long would it last? Who else was it affecting? Every so often they paused to smack him or use the knife, but without any real brutality now, as if they were hurting him just to see the light blossom open beneath their fists, the glittering silver stream the blade left in his skin. His head was clear despite the pain. He was no longer angry or frightened. He watched with interest as his body was chafed and torn, thinking, Look what’s here inside me. Who ever would have guessed?
Finally the one with the hoops in his ear said, “Um, listen, guys, which was it? Did Vannatta say the twelve hundred block or the twenty-one hundred?”
“Look for the Chinese place with the red awning is all I remember.”
“It was twelve hundred, right, wasn’t it?”
“No, twenty-one, I thought.”
“Shit, did somebody keep the note?”
The one with the insect bites spattering his neck took a square of yellow paper from his jacket and unfolded it. “Twenty-one hundred,” he read.
The conversation seemed to drop down a well. Somewhere overhead an exhaust fan was whirring. On the street a basketball slapped the pavement.
“Well,” the smaller one said. “I don’t think the King of the City here’s our man.”
Which was exactly what he had tried to tell them when they marshaled him into the alley: he wasn’t their man, he didn’t have the bricks, he wasn’t even sure what the bricks were. But as usual, somewhere between the thought and the statement, his words had hit a blind curve and been wrenched out of shape, so that what he said was not at all what he had intended to say: “No, no, I’m him. Bricks, uh-huh, bricks.”
“All right,” the smaller one decided. “Here’s the agenda. You, you, and you—go find the other Chinese restaurant. Red awning. Twenty-one hundred block. Track down the dude who’s got our stuff. Me, I’ll stay here and clean up this mess.” The three of them tramped past the dumpster, the one with the ski jacket rubbing his neck with the bent end of a tire iron, his insect bites pricking the air like a firework.
As soon as the others were out of sight, the smaller one made a study of the damage they had done to him, his eyes pausing at each radiant wound like a kid playing with his first magnifying glass. When he had finished, he gave a long drawn-out whistle and said, “Hey, I’m sorry, man. We really worked you over, didn’t we? Look, let me help you get home. Where do you live? Somewhere around here?”
“Around here.” He gestured farther down the alley, to the alcove where he kept his shopping cart, with his books and his blanket all bundled up inside.
“Jee-zus. All right, then. Let me get you to the ER.”
It took the smaller one a while to persuade him to leave his shopping cart where it was, concealed between a dumpster and a plat of cardboard. He helped him totter to the sidewalk, supporting him as he limped on his busted kneecap, which thrilled with light every time his foot struck the ground. By the time they reached the curb, the glare was unremitting. The smaller one looked up and down the street and complained, “Those dumb assholes to
ok the car, can you believe it?” He hailed a taxi. At the hospital, he removed a horseshoe of hundreds from his jacket, thumbed off five, six, seven bills, and reached across the seat with them. “Good luck, man,” he said. “No hard feelings, I hope.” He tucked the money into his pocket, then opened the door and urged him outside.
He stumbled into the entrance bay, where several tired-looking doctors sat watching people arrive, pointing, nodding, shaking their heads, as if at a street performance they were too exhausted to appreciate. No one seemed to know what was going on. The halides were altering the whites and yellows of everyone’s clothing, lending them a flat blue baseball-park color, but the strained tendons and broken bones of the incoming patients were still plainly visible, even to him. There was the one in the tank top, the young mother, two big shimmering battery bruises on her back. The one with the star cluster of hives on his face. The elderly one with a dog bite showing through her stockings, as round and dazzling as a crown tipped with diamonds. But in all that shining parade of injuries, none was so spectacular as his own. As the taxi sped away, the doctors saw him stumbling along the handicap ramp and sprang up from their benches, calling for a stretcher. A radio was playing at the front desk. He heard a newscaster intoning, “From all over the world this evening we are receiving similar reports—of the ailing and the wounded, shedding light from their bodies,” which meant it wasn’t just them, it wasn’t just here, it was everyone and it was everywhere.
Quickly he was wheeled down the hallway. In the waiting area, he saw a man he knew from the camps, the one with the old photo of himself heat-pressed onto his T-shirt, a young peroxide-blond lifeguard with a girlfriend on his arm and a stripe of zinc on his nose. And there at the water fountain was another, the one with the braided gray beard and the Scottish terrier. And later he would hear that a third, the one who sold hairbrushes from the sidewalk in front of Fantastic China, had been hospitalized and died that same night with six broken ribs and a cerebral hemorrhage.