Duplex (17 page)

She had just wrapped her cover-up tighter around the bag of bones that her body had turned out to be and begun to head back to the house when an even older woman caught her eye, trolling the dunes with a metal detector. She looked a little like Miss Vicks though of course it couldn’t be her—Miss Vicks had been dead for years. Whether it was friend or foe, robot or fairy, it was impossible to say. There had been so many Miss Vickses, including the shy human woman.

“Hello, Dearie,” the old woman said. “I don’t suppose you have a spare piece of change lying around for a poor beggar woman like myself? I haven’t had a thing to eat in days and this thing”—she lifted the metal detector and gave it a little shake—“is no use whatsoever.”

“I don’t have anything on me,” Mary said. “But if you come up to the house, I’ll see what I can do.”

For a starving person, the old woman looked well fed, plump even; a bright spot of light, its source indiscernible, rode the surface of each eyeball, lending her a fervent, overstimulated look.

“I see you’ve done very well for yourself,” the old woman said once they were inside. She was eyeing the curio cabinet where the sorcerer kept his collection of Mary-related flotsam, including the piece of blue-green beach glass he claimed was shaped like Mary’s torso, the jar of small translucent shells he said were the color of her skin, and the glossy dark brown seedpod the size of a lady’s compact he’d informed her was called a Mary bean. “No one wants to grow old,” the old woman said. “No one wants to get left to grow moldy in a corner.” She was still holding on to her metal detector, and when Mary offered to take it from her the old woman’s eyes grew brighter still. “Have you made the sign of the cross, Dearie?” she asked. “Have you smoored the fire?”

There was no good answer to these questions. Mary went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “I don’t have much,” she called. “How do you feel about leftovers?” During the week while Walter was away she didn’t keep a lot of food in the house. She located some chicken à la king in a plastic tub near the back but it didn’t look like it was good anymore.

The sound of merry-go-round music from the boardwalk drifted through the kitchen window—day had turned to night and Mary hadn’t really noticed. Often she didn’t. At low tide she would collect mussels, cook them in vermouth, and then drink whatever was left in the bottle. “How about some wine?” she asked, but there was no answer.

When Mary returned to the living room to see what had become of the old woman she found her opening the curio cabinet and reaching inside. “What do you think you’re doing?” Mary asked. “Give me that!”

“Don’t get all excited,” the old woman said. “I only wanted to have a look.” She cupped the Mary bean in the palm of her hand and stroked it like a pet, feeling around its edge with her finger. “Do you know how to open one of these?” she asked.

“No,” Mary said. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea.” The bean came from a far-off land where it grew on a vine so huge a person could live inside it like a house. Some people considered it a charm against drowning, but according to Walter, the darker the color of the bean, the more dangerous its contents. They’ll put anything in, he’d told her.

A car approached, its headlights riding the wall, lapping like water up and over the curio cabinet and toward the ceiling.

“That’s
him,
isn’t it?” The old woman handed Mary the bean and began sliding her metal detector back and forth across the floor at the foot of the wall. It made a series of whimpering noises punctuated with soft grunts, not unlike the sound a newborn puppy makes in its blind quest for its mother. “What are you waiting for?” the old woman scolded. “He’ll be here any minute.”

The car engine idled for a moment, then it cut off.

You couldn’t get into one of those pods easily. Mary worked at prying it apart with a fingernail along the perimeter of what looked like some sort of seam.

“Hurry up!” said the old woman.

The lights outside brightened and went out; a car door slammed and as it did Mary felt a latch inside herself beginning to release. It was the smallest of latches but eventually she managed to force it open, not unlike the way she’d felt a million years ago letting out the baby. The chain of clouds strung around the ocean began to break into pieces. Everything was dividing into pieces to keep the parts clear. The heavens, the earth, the underworld—human beings have always needed divisions like that to know where they are and where they’re going. “What are you doing?” the sorcerer cried, entering the house. The pod sprang open.

Mary Mary Mary
she heard and she knew she’d heard that same voice before. The white wall in front of her had something that looked just like a door in it and the thing that looked like a door began to shake and disappear. There was no salt in the air behind it or sand on the floor like there was in her house. Carefully Mary made her way onto all fours and across what remained of the material world, but as far as she could tell there wasn’t much of it left. She let her flesh down carefully, her face pointing straight ahead. I’m not ready to die yet, she was thinking.

Something pulled her through from the other side.

E
DDIE WAS AN OLD MAN NOW. HIS HAIR WAS WHITE and his teeth false, the youthful promise of his career all but forgotten. The sorcerer had sold the Rockets to a company run by his daughter and the team was once again unbeatable, the company’s business mysterious yet apparently dedicated to the pursuit of human immortality through the introduction of better materials into the finished product. He had also finally been persuaded to sell the family estate to the developer who built a long-awaited retirement community there, including the nursing home where Eddie’s mother and father spent the last years of their lives. No one knew what the sorcerer planned to do with the fortune he made from these transactions; ever since his wife left him it was said that he spent most of his time brooding in the water tower.

As Eddie walked along the neat brick pathways of Woodard Village, he tried to picture the way the estate used to look—he seemed to remember a large ornamental pond where the buildings now stood. The day was mild, the air sweet but with a smell of autumn in it, of burning leaves, and in the blue sky he could see a small wavering V of geese making their way south, hear the plaintive far-off sound of their honking. Mary had always made fun of him, of the way the end of summer made him sad—her eyes would mock him, lovingly. He remembered how she would sit on her porch stoop with one of the other girls, the two of them apparently in deep negotiation for some card, a dog or a horse or what the girls all referred to as a “scene,” meaning a painting from the Romantic era showing a world where beautiful places like the Woodard Estate had once existed. How innocent the girls’ trades were, Eddie thought—he knew so little about it. Mary’s head would be bent over the cigar box, her shoulders hunched, but he could tell she was more focused on him than she was on anything. No one or nothing else in his life had given him that same degree of attention.

Now an orderly approached on the path, pushing an old woman toward him in a wheel chair. The orderly was tall and heavy set and there was something about him that gave Eddie the feeling it was someone he knew. The old woman was just an old woman; she was wearing the kind of sunglasses with side shields a person needed after cataract surgery, and her long silver hair had been put up in a bun. “Where am I?” she kept asking the orderly; she seemed agitated. “What am I doing here?”

“Don’t worry, gorgeous,” the orderly replied. “You’re right where you’re supposed to be.”

“Well, then,” said the old woman. She seemed relieved, relaxing back into her chair only to lean forward once again at Eddie’s approach. “Are you coming to lunch?” she asked. Her voice wavered slightly, the way a voice will after an arduous journey during which the speaker has turned from a woman to a beam of light and back again. “Today is Friday,” she added, clapping together the swollen joints of her hands. “Swordfish!”

Eddie was about to say no, that while the place certainly seemed nice enough, he wasn’t a resident. But then he was filled with a sense of terror. He felt cold; it suddenly came to him that not all that long ago he had been a young man, and that like his fellow human beings he’d always relied on meaninglessly small units for the measurement of time.

“Swordfish? Are you sure?” The orderly stopped dead in his tracks. “Swordfish mate for life,” he pointed out, giving Eddie a look.

It was then that it came to him—this was Downie, his old friend from the ballpark. Not that they’d had all that much to do with one another. Eddie had been a star and Downie a mascot. But even so, Eddie had always felt like he and Downie had a special relationship, that Downie was keeping an extra-sharp eye on him, his vigilance having its basis in something that had nothing to do with baseball.

The three of them made their slow way along an avenue of shade trees, the leaves casting moving shadows across their faces. Eventually they found themselves in the large main building. “Whatever you do,” the old woman told Downie, laughing, “don’t push me down there.” She was pointing toward the blue hallway that led to the level-three nursing home; when you entered that hallway you never came out again except as a cadaver.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Downie. He gave Eddie another look before turning the wheel chair, and the next thing Eddie knew the old woman and Downie had suddenly disappeared around a bend, leaving him alone in the corridor.

Eddie was sure the people who ran Woodard Village did the best they could but there was no masking the smell that traveled up from the part of the building no one wanted to think about and into the part of the building where he was now standing. The smell was composed of night soil blended with the perfume Mary had told him was called Friendship’s Garden that his old teacher used to apply liberally. Miss Vicks! He hadn’t thought of her in years. She’d done the best she could with him, he had to hand it to her. He remembered being rowed across the ornamental pond in a blue boat by a girl with fireflies in her hair as all the while Miss Vicks stood there keeping watch on the shore, her little red dachshund at her feet.

It was hard for Eddie to know which way to go. The corridor he was standing in extended to the right and the left for several yards before branching off in several directions. The wall on his right consisted mostly of windows facing out onto a courtyard filled with plants with very large leaves and a fountain; the wall to his left was hung with paintings. A pot of flowers, a sad-eyed child, a tilting house, a seascape—each painting was labeled with the artist’s name and a brief description of how it had come to be painted. “I used to spend summers by the sea when I was very young,” wrote the painter of the seascape, “but now I have to rely on my memories.” Mary had made fun of a similar painting the night of the prom—this one even included the same body of water that looked nothing like water. He thought of the way the small of her back had felt under his hand, the way the knobs of her spine moved as they danced. He’d had her whole life in his hands—her whole life, and then nothing.

For a while he kept passing old men and women, most of them propelling themselves forward in wheel chairs or pushing walkers; only a few of the residents walked unassisted or with the help of a cane. Music began issuing from hidden speakers near the ceiling, occasionally interrupted by a voice announcing an activity or a birthday.

At some point Eddie found himself sitting in the dining room, staring into space. In one hand he was holding a yellow plastic toy of some kind; the other was resting flat on the arm of his chair. The dining room was empty at this hour. It was the worst hour of the day, the one that came after the big noonday meal was finished and the tables had been cleared and set for supper, the sounds from the kitchen growing harder to hear as if everything alive and capable of meaningful action had moved farther off like a population in retreat after a costly and decisive battle. There were no windows in the room; until the lights got turned on for supper there was almost no light in the room, except the light that came in off the hallway. Soon there would be no sound in the room, either, aside from the sound of Eddie drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair the way he used to when he was young and trying to think. Thought had never come easily to Eddie—he had always liked exercising his body better than exercising his mind.

Cindy XA had brought him the Yellow Bear earlier that morning; though she always came at the same time of day on the same day of the week, Eddie never failed to be surprised to see her. “How’s Roy?” he would ask, and Cindy would inform him, gently, that Roy had passed away some time ago. He died in the announcer’s box in the middle of a game—with his boots on, was the way Cindy put it.

“See if this will cheer you up,” she had said, handing Eddie the bear. The fact that it was yellow threw Eddie off at first. Like many people he associated the color with sunshine and happiness, the old stories never having made much of an impression on him. Since he’d come to live in Woodard Village Eddie had been depressed, even after the kitchen named a drink in his honor. Rum Rocket, they told him it was called. Some of the people he lived with could still remember the way he used to be—like he had rocket boosters on his feet, everyone used to say.

He glanced up and noticed that Downie was pushing the same old woman toward the table where he was sitting. By now the room was filling with other residents, old people sitting in groups of four or six around tables covered with white tablecloths. It was a pleasant room with artificial floral centerpieces and aproned wait staff, almost like a restaurant except all the wait staff could perform CPR. Eddie put the bear on the table beside him. There was a plate in front of him with a piece of fish in the middle of it and a pile of peas at three o’clock and a pile of rice at noon but he had no appetite.

“What have you got there?” the old woman asked.

“You have to speak up,” Downie said. “Otherwise he can’t hear you.”

“It’s a combination plate,” Eddie said. “I’m not deaf. I got one of these before and I didn’t want to eat that one, either.”

The old woman reached across the table and put her hand on Eddie’s and held it and he could feel a tremor run through his whole body that either came from him or from her, he couldn’t tell the difference.

He also couldn’t tell where he was but he thought he could see approaching headlights. He seemed to remember something about a sorcerer named Body-without-Soul, but that was in a fairy tale he’d heard in his childhood. There was the smell of electricity; Eddie’s hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t pick up his napkin.

“See if he can manage this,” the old woman said to Downie. She slid her bowl of broth across the table.

“Here, let me help you,” Downie said, propping up Eddie, who had slid so far down in his chair he couldn’t reach the table. “I’m going to break an egg into it to give it more body,” Downie explained. “If I may?” He took the knife from the old woman’s place setting without waiting for her to answer, then picked up the Yellow Bear and gave it a whack, separating the two halves of the shell and dropping the contents into Eddie’s broth.

The room grew very quiet. Shadows padded along the walls, poured over Eddie like rain.

The old woman leaned closer and took off her sunglasses. “Uh oh,” she said. “It looks like he’s wet himself.”

When she lifted her eyes to his he could see that they weren’t cloudy the way he’d expected them to be but alive and silver and lit by the fire of her spirit, which, like the sun, couldn’t be confronted directly but had to be filtered through the vitreous humor of her material self.

“You look like you just saw a ghost,” the old woman said.

It was the last thing Eddie heard before his soul flew back into his body.