The Judas Glass (10 page)

“You can feel her,” she said, sitting sideways, the navy blue maternity dress stretched over her round belly. “She's doing a scissor kick with one leg.”

“Stella, please excuse me.” I was on my feet, my napkin tumbling to the floor. “I'll be back in just a second.”

She gave me a look of real concern. Maybe I could just go out for a a little fresh air, I thought. Maybe I could just go out and walk around the block. Or call an ambulance, I leaned on my chair. I wouldn't be able to make it out the door.

Every plate was a display of minor carnage, broccoli florets, mustard sauce, cutlet bones chewed down to a few whiskers of meat. And squid, doubloons of breaded tentacles, fried tarantulas.

“Can I help you, Mr. Stirling?” The woman in the black jacket was not worried that I was running out on the check, and yet in the time-honored tradition of restaurant management there was always that hint of civilized paranoia, too many butter knives had vanished over the centuries. Not to mention diners choking on chicken bones, pearls, succumbing to ptomaine. How sick did I look? How likely to sue did I appear, walking as briskly as I could through the busy crowd.

“I left something in the car,” I mouthed, or maybe I said it aloud.

I brushed past a woman taking her time, sorting through her purse, and I apologized, as I hurried onward, wrinkles in the carpet. There were more than wrinkles. There were waves, combers, the floor rippling, the gray mat just inside the door crooked, backing up, fighting underfoot as I performed the public courtesy of straightening out this oversized welcome mat, kicking it back into place.

But I was in too great a hurry to do the job right. I stumbled. The glass door broke around me, over me, and I was outside.

13

Broken glass.

There were big sections of it, all over the sidewalk, all the way to the curb.

The day was bright, dazzling. Sunlight glittered on the chain of a terrier being led around the corner. Sunlight sizzled off the door handle of a sports car as it passed. I had to figure out what had happened, reassure myself that I wasn't hurt. I leaned against a parking meter, holding myself upright, wanting to laugh—chagrined.

I felt shock, embarrassment, and also relief to be outside. But my emotions soon drained to a peculiar, vacant residue. This was not related to the numbness that had claimed my arm. The numbness was gone. My right arm, my left arm—I could swing them both, wiggle my fingers.

I was basically fine, I convinced myself. I was experiencing a fairly understandable physiological state—I had plunged my head into the glass and through it, my entire body following. The transparent barrier had been sturdy. Give the designers of the glass credit. It was strong.

I turned to tell people that I was not usually so clumsy. And then I began to think a little more analytically. A door that could give way like that should be labeled more clearly,
exit
or
entrance only
. The restaurant was guilty of serious negligence. The public had been at risk. I had been at risk. Me. This human being.

I wasn't embarrassed anymore. I was ready to take some legal steps, do the right thing for myself and for the people who were gathering, open-mouthed, giving me troubled looks, some of them stepping forward, involuntarily, instinctively helpful, some of them taking a step back.

The woman in the black jacket stepped carefully through the door, where shards still shark-toothed all the way around the frame. There was a pink carnation on her lapel, fastened there with a tiny brass safety pin.

“Don't move,” she said.

The sphinx speaks! The secret is revealed! I could laugh! Human speech is uttered after an age of silence, and she talks like a movieland bad gal, an archetypal tough babe with everything but a gun.

Don't move! Of course I would move. I'd move all around, arms, legs.

“We just called 911,” she said.

I made a little exhalation of breath, my lips puffing out, a dismissive moue. Who needed 911? Besides, the emergency service was overrated. I could cite case history. But it was nice of her. She was a civilized woman, a professional restaurateur. Her hair was tinted, too yellow. But a man could fall in love with a woman like this, her eyes so full of feeling.

People were gathering on the sidewalk, proverbial travelers, shocked at what they saw on the wayside. No, I wasn't drunk. No, I had not been set upon by thieves. No, nothing in the kitchen had caused any of this.

Stella appeared, not nearly so pregnant-looking now that she was outside in the sunlight. She took slow steps. All that broken glass around her, she didn't want to slip. “Be careful!” I said.

Or tried to. I could not utter a sound. I could only whisper. I tried again, and this time I sounded good. Maybe a little shaken, but audible. “Be careful, Stella.”

“Don't just stand around like this,” said Stella to the group of ashen onlookers. She grabbed at a man's trousers and I laughed, a gasping sound. What was she doing?

There may have been a siren, approaching from far off. Stella had a belt, tugging it through the loops, the owner of the belt helping her, releasing his length of black leather. Stella stooped, breathing hard. She worked the belt around my thigh and wound the leather around itself, tugging, twisting.

My suit was ruined. There was a gash in my trouser leg, and another on the other leg. And blood, blood all the way down inside my shoes, my sock sodden, blood squishing out every time I shifted my weight. And spurting, an art-school-pretty gout of it, syncopated, the sidewalk vermilion, glass and fluid so much slush underfoot.

I sat. The parking meter dug into my spine. It was uncomfortable, having nowhere to lie down. That was what I wanted suddenly. I needed rest.

“It'll be alright, Richard,” Stella was saying, with something like anger. “Do you hear me? It'll be alright.”

The pond expanded. Dust scummed the surface. It was what had been mine, and kept me alive, unthanked, unconsidered. So much scarlet.

My father did not come to see my mother die. He was in London, lingering there on purpose, afraid. I had slept in a chair in her room, the staff of Herrick allowing flowers, although the rules were against it. And it was like watching a person go to sleep, but a bad sleep, nothing pretty. Drowned-looking, at one point during the vigil she spoke. She looked up at me, possibly recognizing me, and asked, “Is it Easter?”

She was puzzled, I suppose, by all the flowers, the colors she could make out without her glasses on. And later I would tempt myself with the consolation that it was for her, the one, main holiday, the open door, the easement, the way out. From that moment I never respected my father as much as I had before.

Glass crunched under Stella's feet. This was something I could not change, a page I could not turn. The people around me could not see what I did, looking up now at the sky. This pregnant woman I did not really know very well, despite our years of association, was calling to me to hang on, hauling at my jacket, trying to awaken me from what I knew was a kind of justice. Not punishment, but right.

“Be careful,” I said again.

I was echoing the last coherent words I had spoken, and having found them plausible enough when I could still think, I uttered them when I barely could open my eyes to look.

I would describe a last insight, a prayer, a loving memory. But there was in me an empty certitude. Everything solemn, everything profane, was gone. If there was a thought at all it was of Rebecca, not as a person—I could not form a clear memory any longer. Not even as a creature with a name.

But as a conviction—that she had gone ahead of me. Into this.

Part Two

14

I could move my tongue.

Just a little, pressing it against the ridges of my palate. My tongue had a life of its own, an inquisitive gastropod.

I was somewhere safe. Very safe. And very quiet. Every thought was heavy, and I let myself drift, encouraged that people would take care of me now.

I tried to remember the ambulance. I tried to invent the memory of a surgeon, intelligent, helpful men and women. This taste in my mouth must be anesthesia.
I'll open my eyes in just a few seconds. Just a few more
—
I'm gathering my strength
.

I let myself drowse.

The first time I looked through a microscope was on a summer afternoon, using the big olive-green Bausch & Lomb scope my father kept under a cloth on his desk. My father had been a distant man, but kind, in an impersonal way, as though trusting that something in my chromosomes would guide me where I had to go. He was, however, visibly pleased that hot day when I asked him to show me something under the microscope, and he came back into the study smelling like someone who had been making sandwiches—there was a smell of onions about him, which was explained when I saw the membrane of onion skin on the microscope slide.

He touched the transparent skin with iodine, and the entire membrane was transfused. He rotated the lenses to get the power he wanted, and then turned to me and said, “There you go.”

It took a moment to see into the tube, and not at its side, or at the obscuring filter of my own eyelashes. At last the disk of light was clear, and even more distinctively patterned when I touched the focus dial.

I saw a city. The buildings, seen from above, were rectangles, worn, or crafted, into modestly irregular patterns, like pueblos, or drawings of biblical towns. There was no single identical geometry to the long, corral-like shapes of this village, and yet there was a general similarity, so that after even a moment or two one could sketch a typical structure, locate its purple-stained center, and describe the thickness of the walls.

We were made of these little prisons, flush to each other, wall to wall. Life consisted of confines. It was constructed of prisons, tiny castles. What could not define itself was so much fluid. To live was to be a fortress.

I felt my teeth with my tongue.

It had its own life, this searching morsel, probing. Soon I would open my eyes. Soon I would make a sound.

15

It was better not to wake. Waking was a room just to my left, beyond, and I knew as soon as I was aware of waking, saw it as a threshold I could cross, that it was too late. I could not go back.

I wanted to stay as I was—as I had been. There was, however, no slipping back into full unconsciousness. There was a sensation that time had passed. There was no particular event, or series of changes, that made me believe this, and I was aware that this sensation impressed me as unlikely. But even doubt is an event, an experience.

There was an interlude, a long period of almost sinking back again. I was aware, but did not attach myself to this awareness, out of focus, dazed into a near-slumber that I knew I had just ascended from.

Something was wrong. Something in me would not be still. This urging was a cricket, ceaseless. I could not silence this nagging, bright inner-voice.

Not yet, I longed to convince myself. I could wait a little while longer. But I was forced to begin to wonder how badly I was hurt. It was not that I remembered an injury, no accident, no fall, no stunning impact. But I knew that I had been unconscious, and some instinct made me try out the word
hurt
.

I slept again, but it did not last.

My awareness returned. I was hurt. I was hurt badly. There was no pain, but there was a sensation of water in my lungs, of cold and a heavy weight on me, in me. I tried to breathe, and I could not. I could not take a breath.

And then I was afraid. I could not block the fear: I was in pieces, dismembered, scattered. There was no reason for this fear except that I knew, deep beyond hope, that I was mortally injured.

I tried to call out, and I made no sound. I could not so much as whisper. I had felt cold before this moment, but now I felt the chill throughout my body, and I tried to move.

I tried to move.

There was no life in my arms and in my legs, no power in me to twitch a finger, stretch the tendons of my legs. I knew I must be paralyzed, willing to address the horror intellectually, in a fragmented way, to fend off the full realization of my condition. I opened my eyes.

It was not a darkness like any I had ever seen. I thought my eyes were gone, the nerves surgically severed. I thought some sickening dislocation had ruptured my body, an explosion or the impact of a car.

I wondered, with an odd lucidity, whether I would die soon, if this shard of consciousness was what my nervous system seized on, a benign separation from the trauma, the sort of addled bliss one hears that people enduring great cold experience.

I had to do something to break my silence. I needed help. I tried to calm myself, but it was futile. I tried again to breathe and the full horror of what was happening pressed down on me. I had not been dying. The dying was before me, yet to take place, and it was going to be agony. It was beginning now.

At that moment, I could move.

One hand, my right, shifted upward though the dark. I felt a tingling numbness, as though the circulation in the limb was poor. I drew my hand up my chest, a cuff whispering over a shirt front. The fingers continued over a cold surface, buttons, a jacket's lapel. I touched my face, and there was no feeling.

And then there began to be feeling, in my fingertips, in my lips. It was the inactivity, I thought, the disuse of my nervous system that made me so numb. The engine of my body was just beginning to turn.

My eyes hurt. My fingers found my eyelids. There was a hard plastic lens on each eye. I pried each seal free and blinked. The plastic disks shifted, falling away on either side of my face.

Now I could see. But there was nothing. Only dark.

Okay, I told myself. I'm blind. That was bad. That was very bad, but not the worst thing that could happen. I stretched my hand out and up. It did not travel far. At first it was a welcome sensation. I was feeling something with my outstretched hand.