The Judas Glass (25 page)

But I knew what Rebecca would tell me. I knew I had lied to myself. I was not going to let the authorities take me in. There would be no audiences, no foreign experts. No release from my condition. I no longer wanted answers. This was what I loved—this minute linked to minute, this power to endure. I wanted more of this, night after night just like this one, two people standing close to me, offering me their lives.

37

I climbed high into the hills. Motorcycles had cut scars in the landscape. Rusting equipment loomed, chains and iron wheels scattered behind barbed wire. I plucked at the barbed coils, slipping through.

I felt my way downward, across a cliff face of glossy, green serpentine, into an old quarry. Rail tracks led upward to the base of a cliff, and then stopped, and the man-made canyon had that profound quiet of industry left to decay.

I was hoping for a mine shaft, and had entertained the thought of finding a cave. But as dawn approached I had to be satisfied with one of the fissures in the cliff, cracks that stretched deep into the stone. I crept into the dark, not certain what form my body would take as I hid farther into the hill, whether human, or winged, or some new disguise I did not want to name.

When I woke I fed again.

This time I found a community of new houses, sod still rolled up like carpets, bare ground and huge boxes at the curb for recycling, the flattened cardboard that had contained refrigerators, stoves.

I embraced a woman sitting on a brand-new patio set, blue canvas directors chairs, an iron table. She was half-turned to look inside, a stereo rumbling, a song I would have known in my other, human life. She was smoking a cigarette, the heat of her spiced with nicotine, the last words she spoke a laughing, “Stop it. I told you stop it,” trying to guess. Trying to name which friend I was, until she was silent.

In my man-like guise I threaded a path through a bank of iceplants, the succulents in flower, a carpet of blossoms. Highway One was crowded with traffic, headlights, brakelights. It was still early evening, two men entering a bar, another man trying to use a pay phone, his fingers drink-clumsy, having trouble with the coins.

Justice, revenge
, I could hear Rebecca say.
I had what I wanted
.

The beach was empty, except for a couple huddled near a huge gnarl of driftwood. The log smouldered, the wind kicking the smoke into flame. A face turned away from the firelight, and I heard a voice ask, “Spare some money for food?”

So often in the past I had received such a request with little interest, although I had sometimes dropped a few quarters into an outstretched hand. But now when I could not, I ached to do something human, commit a simple act of generosity.

I jogged south, away from the restaurant and the parking lot, across the sandstone rubble along the face of the cliffs, until I was was well away from sight or sound of human beings.

The salt foam was cold, but to me it felt tropical. I climbed along the limpet-spiked stones. I considered trying to die again, wading into the water, drowning. With amused bitterness I realized that I could probably inhale and exhale saltwater like so much thick air. It could not take my life. But what I felt was not like true despair. I was finished with my inner sunlessness. Something new was beginning.

A dark heap of animal life stirred. A snout lifted. A dark eye reflected the dim light. Two of the creatures were small, shielded by the adults. The sea lions observed my approach, one of them pushing himself up and out of the pile, wrestling toward me.

Just as a page of writing reflects an author's state of mind, and just as the concentration of a reader echoes in turn that mental landscape, so I was one of life's seconds, not life, but free, as poetry is, or the image in a mirror.

I cast no reflection in a glass because I
was
a reflection, broken out of the frame and glass.

The sea lion dug his fins into the stoney beach, but with each movement he swung his body to one side. He could not approach me directly, because one of his fins could not bear his weight.

He rushed me, a growl, a lunge. I hushed him with a whisper, and knelt beside him. The animal gazed into my eyes, and I had an instant comprehension of what he saw in me. I had begun the evening with a sense of self-loathing, but he saw me as a fellow mammal, possibly a curiosity, but nothing worse.

The fishing line around his forelimb had dug into the flesh. I untangled the knot, and gently pulled the filament free. I tried to open the cut in my fingers, but it was healed. I punctured my hand with my teeth and let a little of my blood trickle onto his whiskery snout. He opened his mouth, like a hound eager for a treat, lapping the blood as it fell.

The world was fertile. These sea lions, Connie, Stella—each thistle on the cliff above stretched its brambles into a future. And I fathered nothing.

There must be some reason we love the end of the land, the emptiness of all that is left. We have to be in love to look at the turbulent void and feel that it belongs to us.

Perhaps it was at that moment that I decided what I would do, but my future was predicated in my growing recognition of my powers, and in my constant love for Rebecca. What had been an obsession for a living man had flowered into faith.

There was no reason for me to hope, and I had nothing like human expectation in the future as I circled, high over the surf.

The flight was long, or it was swift. I could not tell. I did not experience the journey as an event that took place within the fabric of time.

When I arrived at the parkland of sepulchers and tombs I did not search—I only found, without hesitation.

I was there, at the grave of the woman I loved.

38

I ran my hand over the dewy grass.

Her name was in bronze, a plaque bordered by neatly trimmed grass. A metal vase sunk into the earth held three red carnations. They were not wilted, not even slightly. The grass had grown over the grave itself, although a careful eye could detect the border of the more recent sod from the rest of the lawn. Deer scat darkened the bare ground under the trees.

The mausoleum where I had rested was up the hill. I gazed at it with no pleasure. A police car was parked at the entrance to the building. A policeman descended the steps, spoke to his partner without getting into the car, gesturing with a flashlight, the beam lancing the dark.

The flashlight beam silvered the blades of grass, the trees, and almost reached me where I stood. After further discussion, the car door slammed. The police unit rolled slowly, headlights sweeping the trees and grave stones, brakelights all the way down the hill, where they vanished.

Whenever I attempted to think like a man, to read, to plan, I felt myself become uncertain. It was a simple matter, discovering the gardner's equipment, the small green tractor, the tarps, the red-and-yellow cans of fertilizer. But then I was lost in an inventory of possibilities.

Tall rubber boots waited like prosthetic limbs beside huge bags of grass seed. There were so many tools to chose from, pitchforks, hoes, power saws, edgers with plastic containers of fuel riding piggy-back on the shaft of the tool, and all of it speckled with bits of grass and earth, plantlife long dried to yellow cellulose and dust.

But I could not find what I wanted, not until I kicked open a wooden shed. Hoes and rakes tangled with each other, the sort of tools medieval peasants would have seized if called to battle, axes and hammers—and spades.

Spades with sharp edges and long, grip-smoothed handles. I selected one, and felt the joy I had never appreciated in my years, the simple balance of a shovel.

I withdrew the red carnations gently, and laid them on a nearby grave. I took a moment to wonder at what I was about to do.

The first shovelful of sod was tough, the roots wire, the dirt gritty. I flung soil off the blade, the steel ringing musically at the instant the mulch and pebbles sailed into the dark. Again, my sense of purpose faltered.

And I thought as a person would, in the middle of the night, picking with futility at the hard earth. And worse—I felt the normal horror of such an act, the disturbance of bodies which had been committed to the ground.

But even as these thoughts troubled me, I continued to scoop the moist soil, digging deeper. The upper level of the ground was vegetative, roots and plant stuff, but there was no true topsoil. The sod had been rolled out like a living carpet, and beneath that layer the earth was an assortment of gravel and yellow clay.

As I dug I smelled the earth and breathed it, mud on my shoes. This work was not labor at all, any more than the stroke of a swimmer is labor. This soil was the source of my strength.

No other doubt touched me. There was no sense of an hour passing, or two, or much of the night. All I knew was that there had been a grassy patch of land, a prison. And now there was a vault, the earth thrown into a peak at the base of a tree.

Sometimes I thought I heard a sound, a voice, a footstep and I would stop for a moment, and then start in again with renewed strength. At last the shovel rang. There was a concrete box, the blade scraping it, the last dirt dug away to expose the slab.

Kneeling, I broke a hole with my fist. I tore off chunks, letting the fragments sail high, out of the grave. When I had ripped away a large portion of the concrete, I gazed down at the glossy surface of the casket.

Gently, I tapped at the wood. There was the lightest film of mildew on the polished surface, and my touch left bold fingerprints. The casket reminded me of nothing so much as the hard finish of a grand piano. But a piano reverberates when it is struck—it echoes. This box was silent. I smoothed away the layer of mildew and the dark surface reflected the dim starlight.

The casket splintered with one last blow. The shattered wood caved inward, and I cracked open as much of the lid as I could easily reach. Don't think, I warned myself. Don't ask yourself what you're doing.

Rebecca.

I had to close my eyes and turn away.

The gray thing within was littered with splinters, and I told myself again not to think.
Don't think, and don't feel
.

Act. Quickly
.

I broke the skin of my wrist with my sharp teeth. I found a vein, and plucked it. I bit again, and at last the blood was hot on my tongue.

When there was a stream of blood I lowered my arm to the parched thing beneath me, parting the cold lips, letting the life into her.

There was no sound but the trickle of fluid, a pretty sound, like ground water in the heartrock of a hill.

But it was nothing more. It was only a musical splashing that would make nothing happen.

I knew now, as I had not during my life, why animals awe us. They have no hope. No faith sustains them. They have power, and fear, but no past, and no future. The moment is their planet, their sky. But I was still human enough to desire, and seek. This new grief was hard.

Without reasoning, without understanding, I had believed I knew my own powers. The earthen body of Rebecca received my gift without sound, without movement, the blood emptying into her.

I heard them long before they reached me. The police radios crackled and jabbered. Doors slammed. Footsteps whispered across the grass, coming my way. A flashlight jittered over the upper edge of the grave.

I nearly gathered the cold remnant into my arms, and fled with that bundle to console me. But I saw how wrong I had been. I saw how I had violated her rest. I left her there.

I swung myself out of the hole. Figures crouched, beams of light catching me. There were three flashlights, four. The men circled, keeping well away from me. The flashlights trembled. Not one of them wanted to step any closer.

Something about me must have stirred compassion as well as fear. No weapon was drawn. There was a fragmentary truce, a radio lifted, a command given to other police in the distance. Stay away, I wanted to tell them.
Don't come near me
. Not for my sake. For their own.

“Richard?” It was Joe Timm's voice. He sounded shaken, his voice breathy. “We want to help you,” he called, without any conviction.

When I fled now it was without hope. There would be no desire in me for anything but oblivion. Each breath was purposeless, each heartbeat the echo of a real heart, a real life.

I was far from the grave, running through the broad, raspy leaves uphill, land that had not been needed yet for the dead. I hurried higher up the slope. The eucalyptus trees stood tall here, and they had dropped such a multitude of branches and seeds that no grass could grow, only a few outcroppings of leathery weeds.

When the voice reached me I was lost to any thought, escaping through the trees, about to take wing. I half-fell, and turned, looking back, hating myself.

No, I told myself. I wouldn't let this happen to me. I wouldn't let my desires lie to me like this.

Richard!

It was not a voice. It was not a sound at all. It was my imagination, or what passed for it in a creature like myself. I supported myself against a tree, the blood flowing slowly down my hand.

I turned to flee again when my imagination stopped me once more. There was a cry. It came from below, somewhere beyond the trees. It came from, among the police, among the graves.

I knew that I was torturing myself. And yet I allowed myself to utter her name, a whisper. Three syllables.

Again the voice touched me: “Richard!”

I took a step down the hill, my foot half-slipping on the bell-like seeds of the eucalyptus.

“Richard, help me!”

It was Rebecca.

Part Four

39

Men climbed toward me, up the hill. Flashlight beams danced. There was a labored hunch to the way most of them ran, cradling shotguns. They made no effort to be quiet, fallen branches snapping underfoot.

It was wonderful to see him: Joe Timm was in the lead, out of breath. He nearly stumbled on the roots of a tree, keeping himself upright by seizing a branch. He turned to direct his men to fan out. I saw as never before how determined Joe Timm was. It was not bluff. It was a quality he had, like acute hearing: fear meant little to him.