The Judas Glass (34 page)

Although Rebecca's gown looked strictly formal, there was nothing about her that looked dampened or faded by the punishment of the passing months. She had the highlights and coloring only the finest cinematography could offer, and anyone who saw her took in both the readily apparent, her eyes, her smile, and something else. The eye believed in her.

A man and a woman outside a restaurant paused to let us pass, and I could feel their mood change. The woman laughed, and the man looked up from the car he was unlocking.

Rebecca could not stop herself. “I want you to be careful,” she said, taking the woman's hand.

“Whatever of,” said the woman, surprised but not taking any offense at this caution from a stranger.

“He's not what you think,” said Rebecca. “He's full of stories, but you know better.”

“He's been lying to me,” the woman said, her tone surprised but not shocked.

“About everything,” said Rebecca.

“What's going on?” said the man, his smile fading. He looked at me as people did when they were not quite persuaded, when they sensed something wrong. For an instant it was a struggle to deceive him.

“What was that about?” I said with a laugh.

“That man she was with. He's married, or cheating his business partners. Something. She should stay away from him.” She put her hand out to a shop window. Behind the glass a marzipan alligator looked out at the passing street.

“You're tired,” I said, not asking.

“No, I feel perfectly alright,” she insisted, leaning against me.

“Too much excitement,” I said.

We both pretended that was the problem.

We turned at last to enjoy the view. The main street sloped down to the Pacific, and the ocean loomed up, almost at an angle, an optical illusion that made the shops and the Monterey pines look festive and temporary, a town set out for a holiday, not made to last. Only the trees were permanent, fissured bark, roots buckling the sidewalk, bursting the stone planters.

A police car rolled down the other side of the street. Rebecca fell into a park bench. She said she was dizzy, and gave a little laugh of apology.

It would be dangerous to leave her here like this. Her hand was over her eyes, and I could see the heat fade from her. She shivered.

“It can happen suddenly,” I said. “The sounds go dim. You can hardly feel your hands, or your feet. You have to drag in each breath, like towing something heavy through water.”

“I'll be okay,” she said. “Don't leave me, Richard. Please stay—”

“You'd expect us to be able to keep thinking,” I said. “But that dies, too. You don't know who you are, or what you're doing. Forgetting is almost a pleasure, isn't it?”

“Please don't go anywhere,” she said. I knew what she really meant.

But I had no choice.

52

I returned to the park bench, and broke open a vein between my ulna and my radius, and she drank. When we sat together on the park bench afterward we must have looked like two lovers, secluded by the shrubs of the park.

I was glad she did not ask. I could not have explained the scene I had just interrupted, a man and woman like objects in a still life, lovemaking just completed, a sheen of boredom already accumulating in each psyche. How their lust had apparently been stimulated by what played on the television screen, a woman in vocal but artificial throes, an orchestrated orgy I silenced with one touch of a button. Leaving the two blissful, each one a heartbeat away from never waking.

We found a house in the southern part of Carmel, not far from the Carmel Mission and the river, one light on in the den as proof that there was no one home, a desk light on a timer. I nearly turned the light off reflexively, but Rebecca stopped me. I recognized the dwelling as the product of architectural vision, a house all views and spacious, uncozy rooms.

“You think we can live here,” she said in a guarded tone. “No one will notice.” It was charming, the way she said
live
. Steve Fayette would like this house, I thought. Space and angles. I tugged a curtain shut, wondering vaguely why it had been left open, and how long.

An assortment of mail was fanned out on the dining room table. I touched my fingers to the table and came up with faint dust. “They've been gone awhile.” Getting letters had always been a pleasure I had taken for granted. And magazines. Even the catalogs, slick pages of products, smiling men and women, all of it empty, promises no one really believed, some of the models hating what they wore, tired, one or two of them already dying, AIDS, drugs.

“Then they'll be coming back soon,” Rebecca said.

For two nights it succeeded. We wanted to act out a miniseries, a honeymoon taking place entirely at night, but sexless, all normal desire having left both of us, but loving in a darkly fraternal way. Rebecca drinking from my wrist gave me a pleasure more bitter-sweet than sex, taking its place.

I lied to her. The lies were easy to utter, and afterward easy to forget, for a night or two. I told her I'd found a hospital in Monterey, drank my fill of whole blood, and returned. She liked this story—outsmarting an institution, making it a kind of hide-and-seek we were playing, a game we both could win.

We tried on clothes, the man's leather jackets and cowboy boots all too big and not a style I particularly liked. Rebecca had better luck, trying on skirts, pleated knee-lengths, plaid woolens, and one daring black leather miniskirt.

“I understand this marriage,” said Rebecca. “It works because the man likes to pretend he's a cowboy, and the woman dresses like a librarian. He's a businessman, practical and calm—a horse would make him nervous. He bought her the miniskirt, and they both liked it, but somehow it doesn't work into any of her ensembles, only in the bedroom. She pretends to be sensible, he pretends to be strong.”

“A perfect marriage,” I said.

It was difficult to watch television. Something about my optic nerve made the stuttering images look fake and flat, the voices like the sound of antique telephones. Rebecca listened to the music she loved, but the sound of the music sounded labored in my ears. One or two of the musicians, I knew, were no longer living. The conductor himself had tottered into the early stages of senility. I could hear it in the silence between notes. I could hear the way the recording failed to keep anything alive but the dictates of a composer long ago decayed.

Rebecca kept the music quiet to spare me, and her ability to listen to such music proved something to me: that I was the more foreign, less human creature. Rebecca was still like a living woman in her quick pleasure in candlelight, her love of picture books, a child's atlas of the world, dinosaurs. I found any form of reproduced sound or image a bitter caricature, unmistakably counterfeit.

But we were joyful for two nights, believing that we could borrow other people's lives like this, from house to house, indefinitely. We had discovered a form of security, a future. We could play house like this forever, we found ourselves thinking. From town to town, city to city—there was no end.

And then, on the third night, a car pulled into the driveway. The engine switched off, and doors slammed and footsteps approached, all the signs of company arriving. The front door was unlocked, pushed open, and we had visitors.

“The owners?” asked Rebecca. She looked crestfallen. I wondered how much of this looked like home to her now, the unread, neatly folded
Wall Street Journals
beside a display of dried grasses, wheat and pussy willows.

Our intruders entered gossiping. “Someone so needful,” said the young woman, “I get a bad feeling right here when I hear her voice on the phone.”

Rebecca began to hurry from the room, but I caught her. I knew how to hide.

“Needful people are what you have to avoid,” the young woman continued. “She tells me I won't cooperate. Cooperate in what?”

“With
what,” suggested the young man.

“Exactly,” she said. The couple turned on all the lights in the living room. They turned on the television. They went from one room to another, snapping on pole lamps, desk lamps, ceiling lights. “I can't believe she's my sister,” said the young woman. “It's not genetically possible.”

The young man hooted, “Look at all the wine!”

“We can't touch it.”

“You can't tell me they'll miss a bottle of—what's this, Montrachet,” he said, pronouncing it with an over-fastidious roll of the
r
. “You can't tell me they counted every bottle.”

“Wouldn't you?”

His voice came from the bathroom. “Okay, guess what's wrong with them.”

“You aren't supposed to go through the medicine cabinet,” she said.

“Evelyn,” he said. “Guess the prescriptions.”

Rebecca and I stayed just beyond, passing from one room to another to avoid them. “They took the pills they needed with them,” said Evelyn without much interest. She buttoned her sweater. She went to the thermostat on the wall, turned the dial. Somewhere under our feet a furnace thundered softly.

“It's a game,” he called, and I was starting to like him. “Guess.”

“Okay, he likes to eat, he takes some kind of antacid. Maalox.” She paused at the drapes, parted them, peered out. She looked back at the spider plants. She did not like this. She knew something was wrong.

“Correct” came the voice from the bathroom. “But too easy.”

“Did you move these letters around? Bruce, did you touch these letters?”

“I steamed them all open,” said Bruce.

“Bruce, stop fooling around,” she called.

The heater was on, hot air forced through vents in the floor. “It
is
cold in here,” he said. He flung himself into a chair, eyeing the liquor cabinet. “They have that tequila with a worm in it. Those guys are serious drinkers,” he said.

“I don't like it here.”

“Is the heater supposed to make that noise?” he asked.

She passed by him and he snagged her, pulling her down into his lap. “I don't feel right,” she said.

He didn't either. “They don't mind. We aren't doing anything any normal person wouldn't do, looking around at stuff.”

They both stopped, listening.

Then, to hear himself talk, Bruce continued, “It's like when you send a postcard. You don't mind if people read it, because that's what a postcard is—semi-private. When people pay you to housesit they expect you might have a friend come by and do normal stuff like watch television, maybe sit in the hot tub—”

“It's being repaired. It leaked or something.”

“So here we are, and there's no problem.”

“I don't feel good,” she said.

She got up and walked away, tugging at her clothing.

No, don't hurt her
, Rebecca warned me.

Just as the young woman reached the back door, put her hand out to try the lock, a pair of wings touched her, the wingbeats blowing her flowing sweater, dislodging her hair from its clasp. For a moment, her head back, she was a woman listening to delightful, distant music.

When I had finished taking as much as I could while still sparing her life, I stepped into the living room, confident that Rebecca would have embraced the young man. But Bruce was there alone, hunched forward, looking sideways at the television, its red
mute
, its scenes of distant carnage. I pushed the
off
button, and pleasured in the blank dark that filled the screen.

“You scared me,” said Bruce, too heartily. “I thought you all were still on vacation.” Then, after studying me for a moment, he called, “Evelyn?”

I stretched them both out in the master bedroom, fluffing up the pillows, unfolding a blanket. Each had a pulse, each had the expression of a person drowsing, not really deeply asleep, like someone stirred by a dream of homecoming or travel, life about to begin at last.

Only then did I hear Rebecca in a distant part of the house, weeping softly, so that I wouldn't hear.

I found her in a room full of toys, shelves of stuffed animals and plastic monsters. I thought for an instant that this was what troubled her, the sight of some child's innocent playthings.

“You lied to me,” she said. “About Joe Timm.”

If I didn't talk I would be safe. “I didn't kill him.”

“But you did hurt him, didn't you?”

Was that how she thought of it—our touch, our kiss? I wanted to protest that it did not hurt anyone. But I kept quiet, rearranging the stuffed teddy bears, putting them on a shelf by themselves, away from the lions and naked plastic infants. I closed the vent in the floor, all that heat closed off to a faint whistle.

“You lied to me about the hospital in Monterey,” she said.

I wanted to deny it, but she silenced me with a glance. “I know you did. I knew what was really happening. I lied, too. To myself. To you.”

I felt too full of life to be having this conversation, tossing a beanbag shaped like a hippo in my hand. How could anyone give a grotesque toy like this to a child?

“What are we going to do, Richard? What's going to happen to us?”

It was a very simple question. “People travel, go to the hospital, die. They leave their homes empty.” I flung the beanbag animal onto a top shelf, a perfect toss.

“I don't mean that,” she said, with studied patience. “I mean—what will we turn into as time passes.”

“Time won't pass,” I said. Her question angered me. The willfullness of it. The deliberate attempt to be innocent. I was about to tell her that she wasn't innocent, that she was going to forget what it was like to feel guilt. She would have to mature, I was going to say. She was fortunate to be here, breathing. But even before I spoke I felt the falseness of my words.

I could not say such things, not to Rebecca. She left me without looking back, the door swinging silently behind her. When I heard the sound of wings I told myself to let her go. She was right. Richard Stirling was dead.