Winter 2007 (5 page)

I was crying as I walked
away. I had been working so hard that it wasn’t until that moment that I
realized what had happened.

I had begun to bring her
back to life.

Now if only I could bring
her the rest of the way.

As I walked back up into
the city, into the noise and color and sounds of people talking — back
into my existence before her — I was already daydreaming about our life
together.

***

The quality of the silence
here can be extraordinary. It’s the wind that does it. The wind hisses its way
through the bungalow’s timbers and blocks out any other sound.

The beach could be, as it
sometimes is, crowded with day visitors and yet from my window it is a silent
tableau. I can watch mothers with their children, building sandcastles, or
beachcombers, or young couples, and I can create the dialogue for their lives.
How many of them will make decisions that become the Decision? Who really
recognizes when they’ve tipped the balance, when they’ve entered into a place
from which there is no escape?

The old man knows, I’m
sure. He has perspective. But the rest of them, they have no idea what awaits
them.

***

For another week I went to
her nightly, and each time the hand reached toward me like some luminous,
five-petaled flower, grasping toward the moon. There was no other progress.
Slowly, my hopes and daydreams turned to sleeplessness and despair. My studies
suffered and I stammered upon questioning like a first year who couldn’t
remember the difference between a ligament and a radial artery. My friends
stared at me and muttered that I worked too hard, that my brain had gone soft
from overstudy. But I saw nothing but the woman’s eyes, even when Lucius,
without warning, while I was visiting her, moved out of our quarters. Leaving
me alone.

I understood this, to some
extent. I had become a bad roommate and, worse, a liability. But when Lucius
began avoiding me in the halls, then I knew he had intuited I had gone farther,
gone against his advice.

Finally, at the end of an
anatomy class, I cornered him. He looked at me as if I were a stranger.

“I need you to come down to
the water with me,” I said.

“Why?” he said. “What’s the
point?”

“You need to see.”

“What have you done?”

From Lucius’ tone you would
have thought I’d murdered someone.

“You just need to see.
Please? For a friend?”

He gave me a contemptuous
look, but said, “I’ll meet you tonight. But I won’t go down there with you. We
meet there and leave separately.”

“Thank you Lucius. Thank
you so much.”

I was so desperately
grateful. I had been living with this secret in my head for almost a week. I
hadn’t been bathing. I hadn’t been eating. When I did sleep, I dreamt of
snow-white hands reaching for me from the sea. Hundreds of them, melting into
the water.

***

I no longer think of my
parents’ bungalow as a trap. It’s more of a solace—all of their things
surround me. I can almost conjure them up from the smells alone. There is so
much history here, of so many good things.

From the window, I can see
the old man now. He seems restless, searching. Once or twice, he looked like he
might come to the door, but he retreated and walked back onto the beach.

If I did talk to him, I
don’t know where I’d begin my story. I don’t know if I’d wait for him to tell
his or if mine would come out all in a mad rush, and there he’d be, still on
the welcome mat, looking at this crazy old man, knowing he’d made a mistake.

***

Lucius at the water’s edge
that night. Lucius bent over in a crouch, staring at the miracle, the atrocity
my lantern’s light had brought to both of us. Lucius making a sound like a
crow’s harsh caw.

“It’s like the movement of
a starfish arm after you cut it off,” he said. “It’s no different from any
corpse that flinches under the knife. Muscle memory.”

“She’s coming back to
life,” I said.

Lucius stood, walked over
to me, and slapped me hard across the face. I reeled back, fell to one knee by
the water’s edge. It hurt worse than anything but the look in the woman’s eyes.

Lucius leaned down to hiss
in my ear: “This is an abomination. A mistake. You must let it go—into
the sea. Or burn it. Or both. You must get rid of this, do you understand? For
both of our sakes. And if you don’t, I will come back down here and do it for
you. Another thing: we’re no longer friends. That can no longer be. I do not
know you anymore.” And, more softly: “You must understand. You must. This cannot
be.”

I nodded but I could not
look at him. In that one whisper, my whole world had collapsed and been
re-formed. Lucius had been my best friend; I had just not been his best friend.
He was leaving me to my fate.

As I stood, I felt utterly
alone. All I had left was the woman.

I looked out at her, so
unbelievably beautiful floating atop the sargassum.

“I don’t even know your
name,” I said to her. “Not even that.”

Lucius was staring at me,
but I ignored him and after a time he went away.

The woman’s smile remained,
as enigmatic as ever. Even now, I can see that smile, the line of her mouth
reflected in everything around me—in the lip of a sea shell, or
transferred to a child walking along the shore, or leaping into the sky in the
form of a gull’s silhouette.

Maybe things would have
been different had I been close to any instructors, but outside of class, I
never talked to them. I could not imagine going up to one of those dusty
fossils, half-embalmed, and blurting out the details of my desperate and
angst-ridden situation. How could they possibly relate? Nor did I feel as if I
could go to my parents for help; that had not been an option in my mind for
years.

Worst of all, I had never
realized until Lucius began to avoid me that he had been my link to my few other
friends. Now that Lucius had cast me adrift, no one wanted to talk to me. And,
in truth, I was not good company. I don’t know if I can convey the estrangement
surrounding those days after I took Lucius to see her. I wandered through my
classes like an amnesiac, speaking only when spoken to, staring out into
nothing and nowhere. Unable to truly comprehend what was happening to me.

And every night: down to
the sea, each time the ache in my heart telling me that what I believed, what I
hoped, must have happened and she would be truly alive.

In that absence, in that
solitary place I now occupied, I realized, slowly and with a mixture of fear
and an odd satisfaction that my interest in the woman’s resurrection no longer
came from hubris or scientific fascination. Instead it came from love. I was in
love with a dead woman, and that alone began to break me down. For now I
grieved for that which I had never had, to speculate on a life never lived, so
that every time I saw that she had been taken from me, a part of my imagined
life seemed to recede into the horizon.

***

“The arm grew stronger even
as she did not,” I would tell my fellow cast-away, both our beards gray and
encrusted with barnacles and dangling crabs. I’m sure I would have practically
had to kidnap him to get him into the bungalow, but once there I’d convince him
to stay.

Over a cup of tea in the
living room I’d say this as he looked at me, incredulous.

“Something in the magic I’d
used,” I’d say. “There was a dim glow to the arm. It even seemed to shimmer, an
icy green. So I had succeeded, don’t you see? I’d succeeded as well as I was
ever going to. Magic might be almost utterly gone from the world now, but it
still had a toe-hold when we were both young. Surely you remember, Lucius?”

In the clear morning light,
the old man would say, “My name isn’t Lucius and I think you’ve gone mad.”

And he might be right.

***

Ultimately, the love in my
heart led to my decision, not any fear of discovery. I couldn’t bear the ache
anymore. If she no longer existed, that ache would be gone. Foolish boys know
no better. Everything is physical to them. But that ache is still here in my
heart.

It was a clear night. I
stole a boat from the docks and rowed my way to the hidden cove. She was there,
of course, unchanged. I had with me jars of oil.

I had a hard time getting
her from the bed of sargassum into the boat. I remember being surprised at her
weight as I held her in my arms in the water for a time and cried into her
hair, her hand caressing the back of my head.

After she was in the boat,
I took it out to where the currents would bring it to deep water. I poured the
oil all over her body. I lit the match. I stared into those amazing eyes one
last time, then tossed the match onto the oil as I jumped into the sea. Behind me,
I heard the whoosh of air and felt a rush of heat as flames engulfed the
rowboat. I swam to shore without looking back. If I had looked back, I would
have turned around, swum out to the burning boat, and let myself be immolated
beside her.

As I staggered out of the
water, I felt relief mixed with the sadness. It was over with. I felt I had
saved myself from something I did not quite understand.

***

“What happened then,” old
man Lucius would say, intent on my story, forgetting the thread of his own.

“For three days, everything
returned to a kind of normal,” I’d tell him. “Or as normal as it could be. I
slept. I went out with a couple of the first-years who didn’t know you had
abandoned me. I felt calm as a waveless sea.”

“Calm? After all of that?”

“Perhaps I was in shock. I
don’t know.”

“What happened after the
third day?”

My guest would have to ask
this, if I didn’t tell him right away.

“What happened after the
third day? Nothing much. The animated right arm of a dead woman climbed up the
side of my building and crawled in through the window.”

And with that, Lucius would
be frozen in time, cup cantilevered toward his mouth, shock suffusing his face
like honey crystals melting in tea.

***

I woke up with the arm
beside me in bed. I tried to scream, but the hand closed gently over my mouth.
The skin was smooth but smelled of brine. With an effort of will, I got up,
pulled the arm away, and threw it back onto the bed. It lay there, twitching.
There was sand under its fingernails.

I began to laugh. It was
after midnight. I was alone in my room with a reanimated, disembodied arm.

Her arm. Her hand.

It had come to me from the
depths of the sea, crawling across the sea floor like some odd creature in an
old book.

What would you have done? I
remembered Lucius’ comment that the arm displayed the same mindless motion as a
wounded starfish.

I took the arm downstairs
and buried it in the backyard, weighed down with bricks and string like an
unwanted kitten. Then I went back to bed, unable to sleep, living with a
constant sense of terror the next day.

The next night, the arm was
in my room again, last remnant of my lost love.

I buried it three more
nights. It came back. I tossed it into the sea. It came back. I became more
creative. I mixed the arm in with the offal behind a butcher’s shop, holding my
nose against the stench. It came back, smeared with blood and grease. I slipped
it into an artist’s bag at a coffee shop. It came back, mottled with vermillion
and umber paint. I tried to cut it to pieces with a bone saw. It reconstituted
itself. I tried to burn it, but, of course, it would not burn.

Eventually, I came to see
it meant me no harm. Not really. Whatever magic bound it, it did not seek
revenge. I hadn’t killed the woman. I just hadn’t brought her fully back to
life. In return she hadn’t come fully back to me.

***

“So then you kept it locked
in a box in your room, you say?”

“Yes,” I would tell my
shadow. “There was no real danger of discovery—no one came to visit me
anymore. And I rarely went to classes. I was searching for answers, for a way
out. You have to understand, I was in an altered state by then.”

“Of course.”

A sip of tea and no
inclination to divulge his own secrets.

The sea beyond the window
is the source of the biggest changes for me now. It goes from calm to stormy in
minutes. The color of it, the tone of the waves, varies by the hour. Over the
months, it brings me different things: the debris of a sunken ship, a
cornucopia of jellyfish, and, of course, strands of sargassum washed up from
the bay.

“I was insane,” I tell him.

“Of course you were. With
grief.”

Youth is a kind of
insanity. It robs you of experience, of perspective, of history. Without those,
you are adrift.

***

Back to the libraries I
went, and back again and again. But it was as if the floors had been swept and
I could not trace my own footprints. In those echoing halls, I found every book
but the one that would have helped me. Had my long-ago counterpart, standing
there deliberating, thought about stealing the book? No matter now, but I found
myself reliving the moment when I had slid the tome back into the stacks rather
than hiding it in my satchel with at first horror and then resignation.