As a Thief in the Night (2 page)

"Charged?" Elsie asked, "They're going on about that again, are they?"

"Should they not be?"

"Please, if I'm ever in that type of condition, don't hesitate."

"But, if they are in that type of condition, then how can you say they're capable of making that decision?"

"As far as I know most of them made their decision a long time before the good doctor helped them with it. If they were murdered by anything, it was by their circumstances."

"I don't believe in circumstances," Sarah said.

"That's a matter of privilege, not fact. There is no escaping some things."

"Right... And isn't escaping exactly what these people are trying to do?"

"Surrender is not the same as escape."

"But Elsie, where do we draw the line then?"

"We don't; the patients do."

"That's where we're different, I suppose," said Sarah. "To me, who should live and who should die is God's matter. Do you really believe in what this guy is doing?"

"I do."

"Have you seen anything on him? On his medical career?"

"No." Elsie shook her head.

"Another doctor with a god complex. Big surprise! His specialty is supposed to be pathology, of course, but his career is full of bizarre experiments, on the eyes of the dying and organ donation from people on death row just before they receive lethal injection. He thought it was a good idea for them to donate. How can we possibly assume that he's competent to decide who should live and who should die, or 'counselling'—and that is his word—the terminally ill and their families about the nature of death? After all, who's watching
him
?

"Why does anyone need to watch him? People are coming to him and saying that they want to die. They're killing themselves."

"By allowing him go on like this, we're placing a power in his hands that should only be granted to God."

Olyvia, listening with her back turned as she removed wine from the bunghole of one the aged barrels with the thief, made a deep and audible sigh then looked up at the ceiling as if hoping for deliverance.

Elsie pursed her lips, as she often did when she listened, and nodded slightly. "You are assuming that death is something awful. Are we really sure? Especially in the cases he's dealing with. Maybe it's liberation. I heard somewhere that swans sing beautiful songs right before they die.  Is life to be clung to at any cost?"

"Yes, it must be clung to. This life was given to us. We didn't create ourselves, Elsie. So how can we possibly know when we have served our purpose?
  No, I think it has to be played out, to the end, one way or another."  

Sarah turned towards Olyvia as if noticing for the first time that she was in the room.
  "What do you think, Lyv?"  Olyvia looked at her plainly: "I think we're trying to understand the problem with eyes that can't see."

"Really?" Sarah asked, obviously a bit offended. "And what eyes are those?"

"Moral ones. This whole thing is more profound than that. Besides, it's him that I'm interested in."

"What do you mean?" Elsie asked.

Olyvia continued, "What I want to know is what inspires a person with that kind of conviction. Someone who discards everything—career, family, personal safety, acceptance, reputation—in favor of the thing that drives them."

Sarah popped a grape into her mouth. "So you excuse the things he's doing then?"

"I do, but that doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that I endorse the path, twisted or not, that he's taken. Take what you said about these experiments on the cornea—"

"Wait!" Elsie interrupted. "What is all this about the eyes, anyway? I thought he was a pathologist."

"I don't remember exactly," Sarah answered. "I saw something on it and some of the things he did previous to it, and—I may be wrong—all I kept thinking was that it looked like a bunch of stuff the Nazi doctors would dream up."

Olyvia smiled. "You see! You hear all this and think he's demented, or at the very least way too eccentric. I hear it all and think he's fascinating. But you are wrong about the cornea work. What he was trying to do was capture the eyes photographically before, during, and after the time of death to see if they're a reliable indicator of whether or not resuscitation is possible. But it gets better: In high school he learns German and Japanese, but not because he needs them. He's Armenian, and those are the languages of his enemies. Later on, in his twenties, he has a tour of duty in the Korean War and learns to play and read music. And what does he play, almost exclusively?
  Bach, of course! Then, at forty, he drops everything and moves to Hollywood to lay it all on the line for a production of 'Handel's Messiah'."

"One of the few male mid-life crises that might be worthy of respect," Elsie said with a note of bitterness.

Olyvia ignored her comment with a sideways glance. "Then in the sixties he takes this art class. Have you seen his paintings?"

"Yeah," Sarah answered hesitantly, "and he obviously has some talent, but to me they're gratuitous, like his speech. It seems more like he's just using death to be controversial, to make a name for himself. He enjoys the attention."

"Death is what moves him. We don't know, maybe he's made a pact with it. And remember, it wasn't him who made it controversial;
we
did that. To think of it as any more controversial or taboo than birth is ridiculous." Olyvia tucked her tongue into the side of her cheek, smiled vaguely, and shook her head. "Harvesting the organs of death row inmates."

Elsie looked at her quizzically. "So...walking around with, say, the heart of a murderer?"

"I know. Really..." Sarah shook her head. "Come on, he's just another egomaniac."

Olyvia was getting slightly annoyed, as if everything being said was beside the point. "If they need to call him a killer, they can. I don't see a moral problem at all. I see a man worth knowing; I see a man worthy of his crimes."

"Worthy of his crimes?" Sarah asked in disbelief. "What is that supposed to mean?  Honestly, Olyvia, when stuff like that comes out of your mouth I don't even know what you're saying."  Olyvia filled a glass with wine from the thief and passed it to her.

All three of Johann Mignon's surviving daughters were taller than average, intelligent, and of varying but considerable beauty. Sarah was the only one who still spoke to their father; Olyvia and Elsie had split bitterly with him as young women, yet Elsie had strangely insisted on keeping her maiden name even after she was married. Wishing to stay together, the sisters had made Walpurgis their home, and each of them now lived within a short distance of the other two. Ezra's mother, Moira, had been the fourth daughter, and by all accounts the most promising of the girls, but sadly she could no longer keep company with the other three. Despite prayers and séances, tears and entreaties, Moira now remained stubbornly inaccessible.

Shortly after Ezra's brother Layne was born their father had given up his failing business and taken a job as the manager of a strip joint called The Manor. He was a restless man with a troubled past, and three months after he'd started the job he'd run away with one of the dancers. Ezra had almost no memory of him; had he bumped into him on the street, he would probably not have recognized him. By the time his father actually left his mother had grown more or less indifferent. During the six years they had been married he had had two affairs—two, that is, that she knew about—and his lack of discretion had been more a mark of self-destructiveness than stupidity or disrespect.

The downward spiral had begun with the discovery that Moira was pregnant with their second son. Sensing that her husband's presence might now be more detrimental than beneficial, Moira had simply let him go. She had once loved him of course, but her present need for both emotional and financial survival, and her children's need for stability, dictated that if he was intent on destroying himself, then he would have to do so with them safely away from his considerable emotional grasp. By herself, she made it work as best she could. 

The night after Ezra had started kindergarten, while on her way home from the nursing home at which she worked nights, her car was hit by an eighteen-year-old drunk driver in a pick-up truck. He was killed instantly. Her car ran off the road and crashed into a little stone hut beyond the shoulder. She died, unconscious, in the fire that followed. By the time Elsie, who had been babysitting Ezra and Layne, received word and drove to the site of the accident, Moira's body had already been removed. Ezra's last memory of his mother was of the two of them waiting together for the school bus by the side of the road.

What became of the man he might have called father, no one knew. And lacking a satisfactory explanation, which neither of his aunts was able to provide, to answer his inevitable questions, Ezra had cultivated a fantasy that had come to make sense—to
him
. A fantasy about lightning and an old tree...

Elsie was the middle sister, and it was she and her husband Gord that had taken in Ezra and his little brother Layne. If there was a woman who was a natural caregiver among the three sisters, it was surely Elsie. She was the solid one, the nurturer. All one had to do was watch her hands at work trimming the vines, or around the winepress, or at the piano, or even with a hammer and nail, to sense how grounded she was. A calm determination could often be seen in the way she fixed her handsome features, giving one the impression that she carried some secret of strength that other women might never know. She was physically strong, even athletic, though not without a womanly appeal that she maintained despite limited resources.

In the years following her marriage she had often despaired that her maternal gifts had been bestowed in vain. She had become pregnant only once, though Gord and she had tried for years, but the little boy she had carried to term had been stillborn. They buried him, nameless.
And so the departing birds leave the branch naked
.  But the couple loved Ezra and Layne deeply, and both did all they could to try to spare the boys the pain implicit in having a father who had abandoned them, and a mother that Fate had taken by fire.

In many respects Elsie was a staunch feminist; she had become so through contact with one of her own aunts, and subsequently through her readings. As a result she was often overly defensive and quick to anger whenever she bumped up against any of the masculine world's assumptions or prejudices. But always under these constructed, intellectual defenses the true powers of the feminine—those of receptiveness and a nurturing hand—called her home.
 

Without freeing his blankets from under his mattress, Ezra crawled into bed and smoothed the sheets over his legs.
  He leaned over and turned his clock radio on to Global to listen to the Jays' game. Tony Fernandez, Ernie Whitt, Jesse Barfield, the familiar names and the sound of the announcer's voice gave him comfort when he was alone in his room at night. When the game was over he sat up in bed and opened his comic book upon his lap. 

Moon Knight, a hero plagued by the mercenary in him, a mercenary plagued by the hero, was Ezra's favorite character. Moon Knight, a schizoid seeker of justice for whom
two
identities could neither soothe nor save, who split himself from himself again and again only to feel himself pulled into the gaps left behind. He hid behind the clothes of four men. Before the mask and hood he had been Marc Spector, a lost man who died the death of a sinner in the holy deserts of Egypt, he whom Khonshu called back from the jaws of Ammit and grip of Osiris to serve as his avatar. Ezra moves through the soiled streets of New York with Jake Lockley in his cab. Here his allies are the homeless, the prostitutes, the petty thieves, and it is among these he secretly feels most at home. With Steven Grant he lives in the circles of the wealthy, their cars, their mansions, their women. Then, just when it is quiet and the evil has been beaten back for a while, he faces the demons Marc Spector cannot leave behind. Like a white Lancelot, masked and veiled by the midnight sky, the burden of his sin driving him, Moon Knight falls through the night upon its corruption.

Ezra carefully closed his comic book, placed it back in its plastic bag, sealed it at the back with scotch tape, and turned off his nightlight. He woke up with a start several times just as he was about to fall asleep, and then, finally, he gave himself over to the world to which his hero belonged.

The youngest of the three girls, Sarah had dark brown hair, almost identical to Elsie's, though she wore it shorter, just above her shoulders, and often tied it back leaving a few wisps on her face that she was constantly blowing away or tucking behind her ears.
  Her eyes were the same blue as Ezra's, and so far as anyone knew, they were the only two of the Mignon line with eyes this color. The tallest of the three women, she often took a secret pride in what she saw as a mark of superior beauty.

The only one of the sisters to graduate from university, Sarah was now a middle school English teacher. She was also the only one of the girls who still spoke to her father, and although she generally got along well with her sisters, she did derive a certain amount of satisfaction in believing the progression and order of her life to be a sort of correction of all the mistakes—mistakes, at least in their father's eyes—that Olyvia had made. Still, despite certain advantages she held in worldly matters, a marked insecurity was often visible, particularly around Olyvia, in the vaguely superior way Sarah sometimes carried herself.