McBrien and I led Louise downstairs, and I knocked on Mrs. Douglas's door.
Opening it, she blinked, of course, seeing the strangers, and having grown in mistrust of me since I began to receive special care from the Overguard.
Mr. Sheriff, she said.
I'm sorry to intrude on you, Mrs. Douglas. I wondered if I could make use of your living room window, just to look at something?
She uttered a cold “Certainly!” as she admitted the three of us grudgingly. We stood like uncertain guests by a table on which there was a great deal of cut glass—it always seemed to me that china and cut glass were a comfort to women, stable elements in a world of flux, of limbs exposed on ramparts. I felt an impulse to tell Mrs. Douglas that I too felt as if my tyrannized limbs had been hung on ramparts, but that was somewhat excessive, and she would not have understood.
I won't be a moment, I assured her, and I walked across the floor and looked out through the curtains of the front window. It was Mrs. Carter, seated on a bench along the riverbank, watching the entrance of my building.
Who is it? asked McBrien.
The mother of an army friend of mine. I turned back from the pane and looked meaningfully at McBrien. Mrs. Carter. Remember her?
McBrien said, We'll tell the boys to get rid of her.
No, I insisted. Look, she's harmless.
He frowned and shook his head, casting his eyes ceilingward. Louise James, of course, was mystified but too discreet to inquire.
I told McBrien, Tell them to tolerate her, but keep an eye out.
A day later, as I came back from breakfast, I saw Mrs. Carter by the white Toyota, offering coffee from a thermos to the Overguard. It was so strange to see her in that mode, cozying up to my guards. I knew then that she would be troublesome. But, one hoped, as a mere nuisance rather than a cataclysm.
From SOME USEFUL PLOT POINTS FROM THE LIFE OF HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT-FOR-LIFE, NATIONAL CHIEFTAIN, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, AND GREAT UNCLE OF THE PEOPLE.
3. As he reached adolescence, the future President-for-Life developed an innocent affection for his cousin Susan, but he also began to participate with his male cousin Adrian in street marches protesting against the slavish regimes of the day, which were nothing more than clients of London and Washington. Because of his involvement inthese national activities, when he applied for military college at the age of sixteen, he was refused admission. . . .
This two-dimensional tale wearied and distressed me, and I felt bound to put it aside and take tea. Irony is the lifeblood of good writing, and there was a melancholy lack of irony in this document. How I wanted to be back with the comfort of subtitling American and British films. It was then, in sudden insight, for the first time I imagined Sarah's survival—really imagined it, that is, like a scene from a film, from On the Waterfront, except more really. No Eva Marie Saint. Sarah. I could see her, by my desk, with her steadfast frown, her positive presence going along with the negative presence of my trashy novel. It was as if, for a moment, I had created a pattern in all the chaotic iron filings of this miserable existence. I imagined her repeating her slogan: You must not serve.
And I said, But I have to.
Death is better.
But the McBriens, I replied. And the McBriens' baby.
Death is preferable. You must not serve.
I tried to get out, I told the vacant air. I tried that.
An entire dialogue was in progress. I uttered the last sentence aloud. The adored wraith was gone.
Was it true that in Great Uncle's prison, politically sensitive assassinations were achieved by injecting a bubble of air into a vein, or else an overdose of insulin, which is said not to be traceable even by a pathologist? I wondered how I could research this question. And then I despised the thought. Research. As Sarah would have said, Determined people find a way.
I had tried my little stunt, I had tried to find my way out, but a comfortable one and one which allowed even in the act the chance of stepping back from the brink.
I can't imagine what my death will be like after it's happened, I said to an empty room. It was the abiding problem of my life.
I returned to USEFUL PLOT POINTS.
When the monarchy fell in 1958, the future President was amongst those who led heroic Nationals into the Sunrise Palace.
Translation: He ran a gang of thugs who hacked the twenty-three-year-old king to death, dismembered the king's uncle, McCloud, and hanged his remains in front of the Ministry for War as McCloud had done with the senior rebels of Uncle Richard Stark's adventure in 1941. The prime minister got away and headed for Scarpdale dressed as a woman, but Great Uncle's gang of boys had been amongst those who tracked him down in the outer suburbs, killed him, drove vehicles across his body, buried him, and, not satisfied, disinterred him, applied their chardris, and ran through the streets displaying fingers, toes, fragments of scalp.
After the first President, Robert Dunstan, despite earlier promises to the people, made a further secret deal with the British, the future President-for-Life again led a band of patriots whose job was to oppose the new and treacherous president's Minutemen. The future President-for-Life and his uncle Stark tracked a Scarpdale presidential informer to the outer suburbs of the capital and had no compunction in shooting him dead. They were detained in the Palace of Disappearance, Wolfmount Prison, but let go for lack of proof. In prison the future President acquired a sense of the hardihood needed by ordinary citizens in their struggle for a genuine nation, in their losses from the war, in their want and neediness. Released, the future President-for-Life was involved with other young men in an attack on the motorcade of the treacherous President Dunstan. A number of the young conspirators were on the pavement along the route of the presidential procession, armed with weapons provided by people of similar mind in the officer corps. The future President-for-Life took up a position in a nearby building to provide covering fire for his operatives on the ground.
Translation: Even the Fusion Party and the officer corps didn't think he was up to the primary job of performing the assassination, and gave him the number-two job of creating confusion in the wake of the shooting.
When the presidential motorcade came along, some of the younger members of the assassination group panicked and fired prematurely.
Translation: And the future President joined in the general panic.
A number of officials fell, but the false President was merely wounded. In covering the withdrawal of the assassination party, the future President-for-Life was injured, but skillfully evaded capture.
All that was true, though what it had to do with my (his) proposed book, I could not guess.
So the “plot points” continued, following Great Uncle into exile, where he was separated from Susan Stark, his cousin, to whom he became betrothed in absentia. Loneliness, deprivation of love, plotting—even talking to the CIA—all in exile, in Egypt.
The return occurred only when Uncle Stark and his old friend, one General Ian Baker, helped in those days by the CIA, brought a crucial number of tanks and an essential wing of Hawker Hunter aircraft to bear on the presidential palace. The treacherous president was shot against the wall of the Palace of Government. So the future President-for-Life came home and married, and Uncle Stark's influence got him a post on the bureau of the new President, Ian Baker, in which (according to popular rumor) he imitated his idol, Stalin—a rough and only partially educated boy from the country, despised by the intelligentsia of the Fusion Party, and given a special portfolio in relation to farmers' affairs. He also molded the gangs he had led as a youth into the Office of Reconciliation, whose military wing would become, after Ian Baker died, the potent Overguard.
In all this there was a passage which meant something to me:
In the Palace of Disappearance, a prisoner must distance himself from the clammy walls, the cockroaches, the lice in the bedding pallet, and the stench of one's own waste from the bucket. Here there is no light but the light a man creates fo
r himself. To discuss anything with common criminals, amongst whom politicals are often placed, is an indignity, weakens the soul, and reduces its status. The Great Uncle of the Nation, being so profoundly influenced by the experience of imprisonment on two occasions, one short, one much longer, appreciates the horror of the Palace of Disappearance and thus, when he came to his present eminence, decided that this sanction should be used only sparingly, and solely against those individuals who had seriously violated the trust of the people.
I wondered did he thus sometimes undertake summary justice, as it happened with Mrs. Douglas's nephew, to save the prisoner from the memory of seepage, stench, and itch.
Reading those notes, for reasons I cannot gauge, finished me. Maybe it was that their spirit approximated to the spirit of my awful melodrama. I surrendered. I could not go further. I had come to an end. Trembling, I called Andrew and asked him could he enlist Dr. Prentice.
I'll speak to him, said Andrew, and later rang me back.
Okay, the situation is that he's researching the DNA of sudden adult death syndrome sufferers. The deaths, as I told you, of apparently fit young people. Two days' time, Alan. I'll take you to the cemetery nine o'clock Thursday.
The flow of the melodrama immediately shut off. I resorted again to McBrien's liquor.
The day it was done, there was an evil wind out of the desert and the light turned the river the color of ink. Andrew remarked that he had never known an early August day to be as bad as this; the cold was of a clammy febrile quality, and smears of black grit blew across the face of a dim sun. We parked, as is the national custom, and as we had done at the burial, outside the cemetery gates—the pathologist must have taken a truck in, but it was so normal for the living to approach the dead on foot that we could not break the tradition, especially since we were both, to varying degrees, consumed by guilt.
I did not let myself think at all. I was numb as we found our way amongst the monuments towards a small marquee where men in white coats waited, their gloved hands folded in front of them. In contrast to their professionally hygienic demeanor, I noticed the rough clothing and lustily unsterile air of the two grave diggers who had prised the marble slabs aside and already dug out the grave. They had erected a creaky-looking windlass of thin iron uprights near the head of the grave. I was in near and indefinable panic as Andrew nudged me forward.
There's Dr. Prentice, said Andrew, almost cheerily, as he edged me on amongst the monumental columns of mourning and across the arid gravel between graves.
I stood at the graveside, and like a man with vertigo risking a cliff edge, forced my eyes down. There was the sullied, earth-stained white coffin, immaculate on the day of burial, as sturdy still as a reproach in the disturbed earth.
One of the grave diggers gave a dry cough to advise me not to fall in. I staggered and Andrew caught me.
How will they get it out? I asked.
With ropes, he said, nodding to the dusty grave attendants. They're used to it.
I saw a tall, soapy-featured man in a white coat approach me. His eyes were full of a doglike melancholy. Come with me aside for a moment, Mr. Sheriff, he said.
He took me away towards a bare patch amidst the graves. He asked for permission to smoke and took off one glove and hitched up his white coat and extracted cigarettes from a crushed pack taken from his pants pocket. Lighting one, he pushed the pack back again.
I see you're distressed, he asserted. It is, of course, natural enough. But I believe you need something extracted from your wife's grave.
A manuscript and some disks, I told him and began sobbing.
I'll sterilize the pages for you. We have an autoclave for that purpose still working at the lab. The disks I'll need to disinfect by hand. I'll have all of it delivered to you later today.
Let me see her, though, I demanded.
He clamped his cigarette in his lips and held up a hand, counseling me against that. He said, It seems from her certificate the cause of her death was a cerebral aneurysm. But maybe that subarachnoid hemorrhage wasn't severe enough on its own. Maybe she was susceptible to this sudden adult death syndrome in which apparently healthy young people drop dead leaving very little trace of the cause—their hearts look perfectly healthy to a medical examiner, but even so their hearts, not their brains, are the cause.
I felt very much at sea to hear him ring the changes on causes of death, and he could perceive that.
Look, he said, it probably was the severe aneurysm, but SADS, the syndrome I'm working on, is also marked by occasional predeath migraine episodes or dizziness. Do you understand? That's why I'm doing this.
Of course, I said.
Nothing gross will occur, he assured me. We will open the coffin, unwrap the funeral bindings. And I must take a scrape of flesh from the arm or thigh to justify the exhumation. We have no sophisticated testing here. I have to send my samples to England for testing in a lab in Exeter already dedicated to researching the syndrome. We'll have the results in about six weeks.
I must see her, I persisted.
You can't be dissuaded. He sighed. It isn't her.
I owe it.
But it really isn't her. The cells that were her have ruptured. Autolysis has taken place. Self-digestion of the body. It is now a matter of bacteria and fungi and protozoa. It's hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, sulphur dioxide. It is fatty acids. It is nothing to do with you or any humane obligations.
I grabbed his free, gloved hand like a pleading infant.
He said, You're very affected, young man. Then if you must. But briefly, I counsel.
He finished his cigarette. He nodded towards the grave, into which one of the workers had descended carrying a rope.
What's he doing? I asked like a panicked child.
He's putting a rope around one end of the coffin, then he'll do the other end and . . . I'll go back to the tent, if you'll excuse me.
I walked back to the grave and stood beside Andrew. The busy grave diggers connected all the ropes they had placed beneath Sarah's coffin to a single cable attached to their rickety windlass, itself powered by a small petrol motor. One of them, tugging at a lever, started it into chugging life, and they both steadied the coffin as it rose, jettisoning clods of earth. When it was clear, one of them altered a primitive gear on the machine, and swung the windlass on its base and delicately lowered the coffin to solid ground. The engine was cut, and in the silence, somewhere over the river, beyond neem trees, a lonely bird called some loveless too-wheet to the vacant day. The men functionally detached the rope and carried the coffin to the tent, where Dr. Prentice held the flap open for them. The weight of the coffin and Sarah did not seem to strain them.
Andrew saw my tear-smudged face.
Don't say anything, I ordered him.
But all at once his shoulders were shuddering. He, Andrew, the steady man, raised a tear-drenched face to me. I loved her, he said. I don't know how. As a father, an uncle. Maybe in my mind as a lover, but I was always confused about that. You behave like you have a monopoly, Alan. But I loved her.
I was appalled by this display. It was like watching a father confess his sins and his hopelessness. But then I embraced him and felt his body quaking within my arms.
We waited together ten minutes, through unutterable phases of tears, numbness, and panic. But Andrew's collapse had tipped some courage my way—the sense that I was not isolated in my bell jar of torment. I bravely made conversation. I talked to him about this sudden adult death syndrome theory of Dr. Prentice. Andrew could sense it was something I found hard to adapt to. The tragedy which had had only one awful name now potentially had two. Uncertainty had entered.
Don't worry, whispered Andrew, cleaning up his face with a handkerchief. Prentice's critics say he thinks anyone under forty who drops dead has died of that syndrome. In fact, some doctors doubt whether it can properly be called a syndrome.
The grave diggers came out of the marquee early, nodded, and went off to s
moke by their windlass. Andrew put his arm around me.
Dr. Prentice emerged from the tent, gloveless now. He whacked his pants pockets again, yearning for a smoke, but thinking better.
Do you want to come now, Mr. Sheriff?
I'll come too, said Andrew.
The doctor held back the marquee flap and we entered the enclosed air. I was well used to the smell of death from all those zealots who trod on mines on Summer Island, and something in my brain had already prepared me to accept that, though the smell of corruption seemed discreet, focused, almost delicate in here, sharing little with the vaster, generic stench of the battlefield. I saw my manuscript and disks, wrapped in plastic, on a side table. The portable steel table on which she had lain for Prentice's test was being sprayed and swabbed by a lab assistant. And so I gathered myself, my nostrils pinched, and regarded the open coffin.
There are no words for what one sees of the beloved months after death. She was tucked back into her winding sheet, so that we could see only the face, the temples, the ruin of her hair. I looked of course on the putrefaction of all love. It was not her, as Dr. Prentice had said, and yet it was. It was on one hand the parody of a bride. The features were sunken and patchily protected by areas of leather or parchment. The veins at the temples and forehead were a black tracery, as if a malign, skeletal plant had overgrown her brow. But she was above all something pitiful and violated, which should never have been exposed again to air for the convenience of the living.
I heard Dr. Prentice muttering to Andrew Kennedy, These high-priced coffins! Don't do as much for the corpse as the undertakers say.
What was worse was that having seen this beloved victim, I did not want to join her yet in this state, in the journey her flesh was making. I had had that option once, but now not only had it somehow been taken from me, but I would not have chosen it. I had become a normal coward again. I stood there in such a quandary and state of shame that my legs gave way, and Andrew and the doctor helped me out into the air.