The Bird Cage (9 page)

Slowly, moving with care, she gathered all the printouts and slipped them into an envelope. Hallucinations, the final phase?

A church bell tolled the hour of eight, her daily signal to leave the apartment, drop in at a news stand to buy a newspaper, go to dinner at a neighborhood trattoria. She stifled a giggle as she wondered if she would hear Pan’s pipes, see his mad dance.

She walked the block to the news stand, purchased her newspaper, and on impulse asked for a picture of the Fontana di Netunno en Piazza Navona. The shop keeper smiled at her Italian baby talk and answered in English, as he always did.

“Neptune’s Fountain, poster size? Postage?”

She didn’t know how to say about eight by ten, and held up her hands to indicate the size.

He found one in a stack of glossy prints and as she counted out money, he said, “You should visit it at dawn, the first light of the sun. Some say that’s the time of magic.”

“Gracie,” she said and he answered that she was welcome.

That night she was not surprised when the glossy professional print proved to be unlike any of her own. Again, not glaring differences, but significant, meaningful.

That night she also recalled another of the phrases one or the other doctor had used: need a companion. Of course, she thought, she couldn’t be left alone acting out a hallucinatory experience. She could harm herself or, worse, harm others. A companion. Institution? It was just as well she had put it out of mind for four months. She marveled at how her mind was protecting her from remembering too much.

There were things she had to do: address the envelope to her sister, write her a letter, include a copy of her will, details about her bank account, some passwords, name and address of her attorney who had drawn up the will. Edit the ongoing report of her situation for the doctors, make two printouts, address those envelopes.

And she had to arrive at the Fountain of Neptune at dawn to see the magic of the first rays of light. That had to wait until after she had taken care of more mundane things.

The days were becoming quite warm, even hot, but the predawn twilight was pleasantly cool, and there was a slight mist in the air. She was disappointed to see another person at the fountain that early morning, a man seated on the bench she had come to regard as her own. He rose and moved to a different bench as she approached. They were the only two people in sight at that hour.

“Good morning,” he said as she drew near. “It’s a lovely morning, a lovely time of day.”

An Englishman? Canadian? Possibly even an American. He had no trace of an accent. She nodded at him and sat down.

The light was changing from the soft pearliness of predawn to a more luminous, sharper light, the mist was dissipating and the world was taking on distinct edges, defined shapes where there had been suggestions of shapes.

She blinked. Before her was an expanse as black and smooth as polished ebony. Then there was a ripple, another, and with astonishing swiftness a golden aura spread over the surface, to be shattered by a roiling eruption, a crashing turbulence that cast golden waters into the air like glittering beads of gold, showers of gold, geysers of gold, fountains of gold. Arising in the waves were horses, snorting, neighing, tossing their heads, scattering more gold. Their riders were maidens bent low over streaming manes, and in their midst stood a powerful man who commanded the waves to cease, and there was calm.

She didn’t know when she had risen, if she had cried out, but the stranger was at her side, his hand steadying her, and the Fountain of Neptune was a fountain.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She moistened her lips, nodded. “A dizzy spell,” she said weakly. “It’s over.”

“Perhaps a coffee?” he said. “You’re very pale. You’re trembling.”

She groped for the bench and sat down. “I just need a moment,” she said. Her heart was thumping wildly, her breathing ragged.

He sat on the same bench, and they both gazed at the fountain.

“They call this the Eternal City,” he said in a reflective manner. “People link the phrase to the Catholic Church, of course, but it was an eternal city long before the church was founded. Eternity stretches both ways, to forever. Some say the old gods are still alive in the real eternal city. Perhaps they do yet live. Perhaps, like the city, they are eternal.”

He was talking to calm her, she thought. Maybe he had been afraid she would faint, fall down, and now he was waiting to make certain she was all right. She glanced at him. “You’re not Italian, are you?” she said, not for information, but in order to let him know he could leave now, she had recovered. Just a momentary dizzy spell.

“No. I’m a Roman. Antonio Mercurio. Are you certain you don’t want a coffee?”

“Thank you, but no. I’ll be on my way in a minute or two.”

“You saw them, didn’t you?” he said in that same reflective tone he had been using.

She stood up quickly, adjusted her shoulder bag, and started to walk away fast, without speaking.

“Don’t be afraid, Julia,” he said. “I’ll be here for you when you return.”

She stopped moving and for a time she did not even breathe. Dear God, she thought then, he was part of it, part of her hallucination, no more real than the golden water of the sea, no more real than the snorting, neighing horses. He knew her name. Of course he did. He was her creation and knew whatever she knew. Suddenly she wanted a cup of coffee, hot and black and very strong coffee, but she did not move. Her vision had become too blurred to dare take a step. Shapes that minutes before had hard distinct edges had become shadow figures.

“Now we will have coffee,” he said at her side, his hand firm on her arm. She did not resist, but let him lead her through a world of shadows, around a corner, to a chair.

“It passes quickly,” she said. “Please do not concern yourself with me.”

It was already passing. An awning overhead, tables with place mats, an elderly gentleman reading a newspaper with an espresso before him. He lowered the paper, smiled broadly at her companion, and spoke in rapid-fire Italian, too fast for her to follow.

The man across the table from her returned the smile and replied briefly. She bit her lip. Stock phrases she had memorized? Something she had learned and consciously had forgotten?

“Why would the Roman gods alone be eternal?” she asked, and felt that the question had come almost out of desperation for something to say, something that was not the something that needed to be said. Was the table, the other customer, all of it one big hallucinatory experience? Where was the start and end of it?

“Not just the Roman gods,” he said, smiling slightly at her. “Perhaps all of them. These are the gods you heard and responded to. Few hear, fewer respond, and even fewer admit the evidence of their senses.”

“If I had responded to Vishnu, I would be in Calcutta sipping tea,” she murmured. “Is that your meaning?”

He laughed.

She looked away from him, at the street where shopkeepers were starting to open awnings, to put out signs advertising their wares, arrange pastries in windows, open freezer cases with gelato… Although it all looked real, concrete, she no longer felt any trust in the evidence of her senses. The evidence of her senses was being warped by a growth in her head.

“Perhaps it is granting you freedom to see for the first time what has always been there,” he said.

Resolutely she kept her gaze averted. A waiter came and greeted her companion as an old friend, volubly, effusively, including her in his obvious welcome.

When a fast-paced dialog ensued, she felt her hands trembling again. The waiter laughed, spread his hands, and bowed to her before he withdrew, shaking with laughter.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“I told you. Antonio Mercurio.”

She resisted the temptation to look at his feet clad in sandals, and he laughed again. “No, no wings on my heels.”

“I’m going mad,” she said in the same low voice, hardly above a whisper. “I see illusions, hallucinations. I don’t know what’s real, what isn’t.”

“Reality has many faces,” he said. “You have completed the first two parts. There is one remaining. You must admit the evidence of your senses.”

She shook her head. The waiter returned with coffee and they spoke words she could not understand. She gripped her coffee cup, welcoming the heat.

“What did you see in your pictures?” Mercurio asked when the waiter left once more.

“Changes, a sequence of changes. I hallucinated them to illustrate a story in my head. There weren’t any real changes.”

“Was the sequence finished?”

“I don’t know.”

“And at dawn, what did you see?”

She shook her head harder, risking blurred vision again.

“When we leave, you must choose. Turn left and I’ll walk with you to your bus and wait for it with you. Turn right, and we return.”

“Back to the Fountain of Neptune.”

“Fontana di Netunne,” he said. “And you must then tell me what you saw at dawn.”

Back to her apartment, probably a doctor, hospital. She pushed her coffee cup back and rose from her chair, and they took the few steps to the sidewalk where she paused, then turned right.

“I saw a golden sea, horses rising with maiden riders, I saw Neptune command the waves to stop roiling and crashing, and there was a calm golden sea.”

They approached the fountain, and now the sequence was finished. Neptune had completed his gesture. His gaze was on her, his extended hand reached out to her, and with Mercury at her side she walked into the warm, golden water of Netunne’s sea.

Rules of the Game

I WAS WATCHING A SENATOR give a speech a few years ago: “They say it’s not about money, it’s about money. They say it’s not about politics, it’s about politics. They say it’s not about sex, it’s about sex.”

Then Harry came in and said, “Hey, so the guy plays around a little. What’s the big deal?”

Eleven months ago I kicked Harry out, after six years of being married. He talked me into calling it a trial separation, and agreeing to let him keep his office in our house because he had a year’s supply of letterheads and cards with this address. He even had an ad in the yellow pages with this address and phone number: Computer Consultant, On Site. He hung out here, ate my food, drank my coffee, and was gone by the time I got home from work. Too late I realized that what he gained from our agreement was rent-free office space and freedom.

I left him a note in his pigsty of an office telling him I wanted a divorce. He never got around to answering. I left the divorce papers on his desk; they vanished. He was as elusive as a wet fish when I tried to reach him.

Two weeks ago I buried him.

Now I’m starting to clean up the messes he left behind, especially his office here in my house. There are dirty coffee mugs, glasses, half a sandwich with a thriving mold colony on it, papers everywhere, and three computers. I pick up two mugs and a glass and start to take them to the kitchen when suddenly he’s there.

Harry Thurman, as big as life, if not as solid. I can see a lamp through him. He’s like a full color transparency.

I cry out and drop the mugs and the glass, and he yelps and disappears.

“And stay out!” I yell at the lamp.

I step over the mess on the floor, run from the office, and close the door behind me. I’m shaking. A hallucination, a figment of my imagination. A visitation? I’ve read that it’s not uncommon to see the newly departed, a fleeting image, sometimes a comfort to the grief-stricken. I’m hardly that, not that I wanted him dead, just out of my life.

I admit I was shaken by the suddenness of the apparition, but I don’t feel afraid. What I feel is anger. How dare he do that, show himself when I’m cleaning up after him again? My fury ignited when I opened his apartment to clean it out and found expensive suits, a huge flat-screen television, DVD system, Chivas Regal… He drove a two-year old BMW. For a year I lived in near poverty, making our mortgage payments, insurance, his and mine, taxes… I cashed out my 401K to meet payments, since I couldn’t sell the house without his cooperation. A small inheritance from my aunt made the down payment; I would have lost everything if I failed to pay up every month. My fury increased when I found two gift boxes in his bureau, one addressed to My Darling Marsha. That was a bracelet with semi-precious gems and pearls. The other was to Dearest Diane, a heavy gold chain. I also found four credit card bills totaling twenty-seven thousand dollars, for which I am responsible since I’m his widow and my name is on them along with his. And he had the nerve, the effrontery to show himself!

“Let it go,” I tell myself, and head for the kitchen for a glass of water, and decide I really want more than just water. I take a gin and tonic into the living room where I sit and regard the bracelet and gold chain on the coffee table.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” Harry says, and he’s mostly there again, blinking on and off like a Christmas tree light.

Very carefully I put my glass down on the coffee table, then close my eyes hard. “Either come in all the way, or go out, but stop that blinking!”

“I’m doing the best I can.”

When I look again, he’s still there, no longer flickering, and I can still see through him.

“You’re not hallucinating,” he says. “I’m really here, or mostly here.”

I take a long drink. “Why?” My voice is little more than a whisper.

“I don’t know why. I just found myself here. You scared the shit out of me when you suddenly saw me, by the way.”

“What do you mean? How long have you been here?”

“When did that real estate agent come?”

“This morning.”

“I was here then. Two hundred seventy five thousand for this place! Wow! You’ll make out like a bandit. Didn’t I tell you that mortgage insurance was a good idea? And double indemnity for my insurance, plus the BMW. Beautiful rich young widow. What are you going to do with all that dough?”

“Harry! Stop this. Why are you here? What do you want?”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“No. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

After a moment, looking surprised, he says, “Neither do I.”