Boundaries (10 page)

This house needs people in it
, he thought, knowing that he was trying to distance himself from his purpose here.

At last, he drove off.

“
G
oing to be a beautiful day," said the voice.

David looked back. He saw a shadow, man-shaped, and behind it the pines, which were in great abundance here, and beyond the pines, wedges of pale blue sky. And above . . .

Above
.

"No rain today," said the voice. "No darkness today."

Above.

"Today there is blue sky," said the voice. "Today is a beautiful day. All day."

David reached for the shadow of the man. He had no real idea why; perhaps he wanted to test this place, find its reality. But his arm was unfamiliar to him, white and straight—a piece of wood. Then there were muscles in it, then the skin was pink, and he recognized it.

But his arm was still a good distance from the shadow of the man, and David’s outstretched fingers touched only air.

He felt a breeze tickle the hair on his arms.

In awe, he whispered, "This is the earth."

The shadow of the man said, "Going to be a beautiful day. No dark today. Beautiful day."

David’s arm dropped. He moved forward, closer to the shadow of the man. The man receded. The shadow receded. Its movement was attended by a low, flat rustling sound, like paper being crumpled. It was the sound of distance being established, David realized.

The shadow said aloud—louder, though still without urgency—"You can’t stay. How can you stay?"

Then there was again the sound of paper being crumpled, and the shadow moved very quickly, as if it were the shadow of something very small that was being withdrawn by something very, very large. And so, in a moment, stillness was in the forest again, in the dust hanging in the air, in the silence.

~ * ~

At the house, dust collected, settled, formed, dissipated, collected again.

In the fields surrounding the house, people were picking fruit that grew on plants which hung close to the ground. The fruit was sweet, pungent, and red, like strawberries, and one of the people gathering the fruit straightened in the white light, held a piece of the fruit between his fingers, and smiled. "We could have whipped cream with this," he said.

There were people around him, but they made no acknowledgment of him. And the man, having already forgotten what he had said, popped the fruit into his mouth, enjoyed the squish of it under his tongue, and continued picking.

~ * ~

Christian Grieg and Karen Duffy had stayed at a motel outside Syracuse for the night following their visit with David, and they had made love. It was their first time; it had been awkward, self-conscious, unsure, and now, over breakfast at the motel’s tiny restaurant, they were mutually embarrassed but did not want to show it.

Christian was thinking, as he and Karen talked, about the mistakes he had made in his life, the regrets he had fostered and sheltered now. This woman was one of those regrets, he had decided. He did not love her. How could he love her? She was like his sister, or his mother, so it would be wrong to love her in the way that he had.

"I’m sorry, Karen," he cut in.

She stopped talking. She had been talking about her work. "Sorry?" she said, not so he would repeat what he’d said, but because she simply hadn’t heard him.

"I said nothing." He pushed a bit of scrambled egg around his plate. "Go on," meaning that she should go on talking about her work.

Karen mentally played back the last half minute. "You’re sorry for last night, Christian? You needn’t be."

A family came into the tiny restaurant. They were a family of four—mother, father, girl, boy—and they were all very fat. The father said in a high, squeaking voice to the mother, "Over there, Alice," and indicated a booth just behind the booth that Karen and Christian were in.

Christian glanced around at the family; he grimaced a little as they sat down, the man with his back to Christian, so the seat Christian was in moved and shifted. Christian looked around again. He said to the back of the fat man’s head—which was covered with thin black hair—"Do you
mind
?"

The man did not respond.

Karen said, confused and embarrassed, "Christian?"

The fat man shifted in his seat, making room for his hefty wife. The wife said, "I don’t have no room, Earl."

The two kids were pushing at each other now, not because they had no room but because they often pushed at each other. They smiled
chubbily
as they pushed; it was a game.

The fat man leaned forward to stop them then, and, when the kids quieted down for the moment, he leaned back with a
whump
.

Christian said again, "Do you
mind
?"

The fat man craned his small round head around and smiled at Christian. "Sorry?"

Christian hissed, "You’re
moving
my seat, dammit!"

The fat man stopped smiling. His wife glanced critically at Christian, frowned, then looked at her children, who were again pushing at each other. As her husband had done, she reached across to separate them.

The fat man looked at his wife. "Let’s move, Alice," he said. Alice nodded, and in a moment the family had seated themselves at a booth on the opposite side of the small room.

Karen said to Christian, "That was rude, Christian."

Christian said, "They were people to be rude to. Unnatural people."

~ * ~

Jackson found the window through which he had come into Anne’s house and he stared confusedly at it from the floor. Finally, he leaped to the sill. He paused there, his four feet balancing him on the narrow sill, his big orange head bobbing, tail twitching. His tail twitched when he was in thought. For him, thought consisted of a series of almost random memories (pictures) that flitted through his brain. The memories were weighted plus and minus (though he did not consciously will this). One of the minus pictures which flashed through his head and vanished was of the night and the outdoors, and for Jackson that was blackness and noise and the touch of a thousand small creatures. The noise consisted of grunts, hoots, feet crunching the earth nearby. He had been outside at night only a few times, mostly as a kitten, and those times had formed for him a pulse of terror in the back of his cat brain, because although the hoots and the touch of a myriad of small creatures were disconcerting, the crunch of earth nearby told him that something very heavy was walking about, something his poor eyes could not see. And his only recourse was to run from the sound; run into blackness—into walls and trees, the tires of parked cars. So there really was no escape.

Except inside, into the light.

Which formed a plus memory. Being inside at night, his nightlight guiding him safely into sleep.

There were other pluses and other minuses, all having to do with danger, safety, hunger, contentment; and they were mixed together in his cat brain so that
outside
did not necessarily translate as
danger
, and
inside
did not necessarily translate as safety and contentment.

So he balanced on the sill in Anne Case’s house until, at last, some random pulse, like a spark, sent him leaping to the ground three feet below.

Above him, the window—its casing dried—slammed shut from the movement.

Jackson looked up. He meowed, mouth opening wide in confusion, his poor eyes fixed on the closed window, tail twitching, cat brain racing.

He was out. The way in was shut. He
had
to be in.

He meowed pleadingly for a very long time at the closed window.

~ * ~

The body in the bed lay nearly as still as earth, shallow inhales and exhales marking slow time, and Death, waiting nearby, wanted so much to climb into the body, to still the breathing and make the body as cold and as motionless as stone. It was what reigned in the universe, cold and stillness. But Death couldn’t climb into the body on the bed—its spirit was gone, was on an odyssey.

So Death stood by—and to all the eyes that watched, it looked much like the shadowed juncture of two walls, the straight line of Death.

B
atavia was a small upstate New York city and Fred Collins—who had spent all of his adult life as one of its policemen, and had therefore passed a lot of time on its streets, watching its people—had a good eye for spotting the longtime Batavia resident, the visitor, the newcomer. He knew many Batavia residents by name, others simply by face or reputation.

He knew the patterns of their movements through the city within each month and season. He knew the drably dressed welfare mothers—usually with passive, obedient children in tow—the young singles, who seemed to breeze through the stores and malls, and then breeze out, back to their three-room apartments in one of the city’s outlying apartment complexes; the transients, who—few though they were—were like transients everywhere; the young
marrieds
with infants strapped to their backs or belted into
Perego
strollers.

Fred Collins thought that he remembered Anne Case in the city, thought he remembered her moving quickly from store to store on that squat and white-walled main street, hugging close to the buildings, head down. And, in his memory, she was dressed as if to hide, even on that warm summer day, as if to be within the walls of her clothes.

But there was something good and childlike about her, he remembered (or thought he did), a warm and very appealing simplicity.

She would have been easy to pick out, easy to remember, even if he had seen her only once.

But he knew that he had never seen her until the day of her death, when there had been sixty-three stab wounds clustered around her stomach and back, and a look of peaceful repose in her eyes.

But he manufactured the memory, anyway, and thought it was good, thought that it comforted him.

He called to her in it, "Hello, Anne. Fine day."

But she did not stop as she moved quickly from one store to another on that squat street of white walls and storefronts. She merely turned her small, pretty face toward him, the glimmer of a smile and recognition came to her, and then was gone.

~ * ~

On the Other Side, there were cities that were both like and unlike other cities; they were places where people congregated. There were restaurants, museums, theaters, things nostalgic.

Wood predominated in these cities, but there was also brick—made from earth and water, baked in the light—and the roofs of the houses were tiled with flat stone. A panorama of the cities from some high point would have shown these flat stone roofs of various pitches and sizes, and the walls of many colors beneath.

Cars did not exist here, though people could occasionally be seen standing on corners, near the roadways—which were made of brick or flattened earth—with their arms outstretched. This behavior could continue for what would seem like a very long time to an observer from some other place.

In the museums there were artifacts on display which were in actuality manufactured things made from memories dulled by death and transition. There were replicas of washing machines, stereos, TV antennas, telephones and telephone booths, automobiles, floor lamps, children’s toys of various kinds (teddy bears, rag dolls, building blocks, tricycles), guns, cameras. None of these items were functional. They were fashioned from various materials—stone, wood, earth, paper.