The Judas Glass (22 page)

I breathed the scent of this cast-off stocking, and let it fall. I stood, scenting the air around me, and seeing. Not seeing these walls, and not this place, but Rebecca's house, the fire, the carpet bunched and smouldering, the taste in the air, on her, of more than smoke.

My hand took it down from a shelf before I had time to consider it: a miniature bust, a composer. I turned the key on the base, and the inner workings spun. The thing chimed in my hand. In my present state of mind the notes jangled tunelessly.

There were voices in back of the house, now, a whispered, “Listen.”

“I don't hear anything.”

“It's a music box.” The younger man's whisper could not disguise a note of tense hilarity. “Someone is playing a music box.”

I wanted to tell them that the man who lived here was not coming back. I could feel him out there, the v-necked T-shirt, his new athletic shoes, his raincoat. I knew how his mind worked. He thought in flat, simple symbols, like the icons for files on a computer screen. Like the notes on a page of music. My mind pieced together the tune the music box had played, Chopin, the Minute Waltz.

Enjoy your new life, Rebecca would say. She would press her fingers over my lips when I began to argue.

Enjoy your powers, she would say.

Leave this man alone
.

“Look at this,” said the younger cop. “Busted. The back door is totally busted.” He said this in an outraged whisper.

But I knew what they were thinking—breaking and entering.

Wait for backup
. The command was never given. I met them at the back door like a landlord welcoming the police he had requested a half an hour ago, and both cops were open-mouthed, one of them producing a small flashlight, the other one, the younger cop, reaching for me, catching me, pulling my arm around behind my back in a maneuver I recognized from playground scuffles and courtroom testimony of arresting officers.

Before they could get a good look at me the flashlight bounced off the ground. The older cop threw himself into the struggle, but both of them stiffened, sensing something, beginning to lose enthusiasm for embracing me. As I spun away, the older one put out his hand.

He grabbed the shoulder of the younger cop, but the younger man would not listen. “No, don't go after him,” said the man who knew better, the man who would survive the last months of his career and retire in peace.

The younger man, responding to the same impulse, could not stand to see me escape. He tore himself free from his partner, digging into his clothing, pulling out his gun.

32

In the infinite theater of the outdoors the young cop's pistol did not make much noise. The tiny pops I left behind sounded like the beginning of a labored celebration, firecrackers whether anyone wanted them or not.

Even when a bullet whipped through the air to my left no urgency was attached to it. The
smack
it made as it struck a newly shingled roof was the random flaw in a sound track, old and badly used, the single skip in an old record. But he persisted. Long after my fleeing form had begun to skim along the ground, far beyond what he could see with any accuracy, he ran after me, shaking spent shells from his revolver.

A black rope lashed me, a powerline. I clung to the coarse cable with my feet. I snapped at the air, trying to work my small bones into a position of comfort. The powerline crackled. My breathing was fast. My heart was a tiny drum roll. I was both webbed and furred, swinging upside down.

Below me the cop ran, slowed, stopped, looking up the street, walking out to the middle of it. The scent of his perspiration was in the air. A car slowed, sounding its horn, then sped away. The weapon in the man's hand became not a symbol of authority but proof that he was desperate, a frightened figure, necktie over his shoulder.

With my eyes closed I perceived a distorted photocopy of a bus as it approached. The dark was rich with thousands of tiny wings, moths, fine details, the Jerusalem cricket laboring like an astronaut in the dark lawn.

I let go, fluttering downward. With an effort not unlike a pushup I arrested the fall, rolled, kneaded the wind, fingering my way upward. The young cop did not even see me, regaining his composure, tucking his gun back inside his clothes.

And if he had seen me his mind would have taken in nothing—only the night, and something night-colored and quick. Nothing, something that did not matter, outside the human vocabulary.

My hunt began.

Even in flight I was methodical, seeking to master my experience. Skin extended between the elongated finger bones. The leather membrane attached to the sides on my body, and to the crooked remnants of my legs. The tips of my wings moved the greatest distance, generating thrust. The inner wing, closer to the wet fur of my flanks, created lift.

Mist captured me, then broke up, and I was above the choppy, gauzy alps of the clouds. A scratch of moon illuminated the cloud, the white wrinkles of the surf far below.

There was a rumble to the south. The jet powered upward, far off. But it was not long before the air around me churned with the punishment of the engines.

I screamed, and the diameter of sound flashed outward. I fought upward through the cloud again. The bay was black, marked by tiny crawling lights where traffic crossed a bridge. A boat or a buoy, a single lint of light, floated unmoving in the emptiness. Far across the bay, to the northeast, was Rebecca's grave.

Sometimes I would slip, like a person drowsing and startled awake by the act of sleep. I would jolt to my human senses and panic, and begin to plummet, forgetting I could climb upward again only by remaining wordless, disregarding everything I had ever known.

I coasted, fluttering, gliding, breathing the potpourri of human odors from below. There were too many people here—the search would be endless. But my new incarnation endowed me with an inhuman single-mindedness.

A mirror experiences no fatigue. When the room is empty the glass stands sentinel, reflecting the unstirring room, the drift of dust motes in the sunlight from the window, the blouses, the scarves, abandoned on the bed. It echoes the light without weariness. Locked in a cell, a closet, sealed in a carrying case of pine, the mirror answers the dark with dark.

A computer searching for a name in a long scroll of text could not match my patience. Besides, I knew something about my quarry, what he preferred, where he would choose to disguise his life, the plain habits, the simplicity.

I knew his thoughts, the cheap transistor radio of his psyche. I knew his smell.

I called Dr. Opal, once, from a pay phone beside an apartment building. I asked the operator to make the connection, and Dr. Opal's voice was in my ear before I expected it, eager, full of hope.

“Where are you?” he asked before I could speak more than a few words.

“You can tell them,” I said. “They won't be able to catch me.” This wasn't what I had intended to say. I simply wanted to be sure that Dr. Opal was not distraught, and I was curious—how much did the police know?

“Tell who?” He searched for words. “Without you here as proof I would sound crazy.”

And I realized that he really didn't know. The death of the woman at the party, the news reports that must have circulated by now—he had not heard them, or he would not let himself connect them with me. He was deceiving himself. He would not let himself understand how dangerous I was.

The finest mirrors of the early Renaissance were created in Venice. The guildsmen there knew the craft of sealing an amalgam, silver or mercury, onto a sheet of glass. One night, the story goes, one of these master artisans fled Venice. He rode west to sell this trade secret to another principality. The man was stabbed to death on the road to Bergamo, the single plunge of a stilleto through the heart. His throat was cut to finish the job, and he was left beside the road for the magpies.

Except for one hand. This hand was carried back to the Doge's palace in a blue silk sack. The noblemen of Venice knew how imperfectly a report reflects the truth, even the testimony of a trusted assassin. They needed proof.

33

Broken sleep met me as I skimmed porches and fire escapes. Lovers lost all passion, dreamers all sequence, as I fingered past each human form, sorting, glancing, tasting the air. My search was a kind of sleep. He was the dream. I hunted the bungalows and apartments of the Richmond District, of the Sunset, the lawns and window boxes of Parkside.

Nothing escaped me. The spaghetti of streets, the warehouses, the television antennas commanding Twin Peaks, the Mission District, garages, empty playgrounds.

I searched for two nights.

On waking each twilight I was weaker, and when I fed I became more alive, more tireless, more determined. I could feed on the wing, hovering above a sleeping man or a woman, piercing and lapping with my tongue, the tongue itself a coiling, demanding organ, nursing the blood from the vein. Only what I needed, I promised.

All for Rebecca.

When I tried to remember my life as a man, the memories were beyond reach. It was a mild surprise that when I recalled anything about my life, I remembered houses, steps, doors. Human dwellings, decals worn thin by sun and wind. I could not remember faces, laughter, affection. Sex was impossible to imagine, a fleshy knot.

But I did have one or two vivid memories. Of being with my father in a lab, beside glass boxes. Wood shavings curling around sleeping white mice.
What experiment are they for?
I asked. Or maybe I didn't have to ask. “Little animals like that die so people can live,” my father said.

The statement baffled me. My father laughed gently, maybe embarrassed at his own didactic blather. “They can see if a new medicine will kill people by using it on rats and mice.”

I knew that already. But what I had not known was how like someone I had known a mouse looked, gazing up at my shadow with his blood-dark eyes. I had not known how unfeeling my father was, opening his appointment book, ignoring the living creatures all around us. The rats dragged skin tumors the size of oranges through the curls of wood.

When my mother died I called my father in London. He was staying at the Savoy, and I hoped he wasn't in his room, calculating the time difference. He was eating breakfast, I told myself. He was taking a walk by the river. But he answered just as I was about to hang up, just as I was feeling thankful that I had bought a little more time.

“But that's not possible!” he'd said.

I let him try to convince himself.

“I don't believe it,” he said, stern, in command.

I experienced a weird pleasure, feeling superior, because I had already seen the truth and accepted it, having no choice. Having held her hand, feeling how heavy it was, how empty of love.

My days were spent under houses, under the roots of trees.

On the third night my hunt seemed about to end.

I could scent him in the wind, and I could guess at his dreams, the badly sorted deck of cards, the half-waking fever. He was sick, and he was always afraid.

South of Pacifica a neighborhood stretched away from the ocean, following a creekbed up into the hills. It was a populated woodland, firewood on back porches, tin-roofed cabins next to three-story houses, pickups parked beside Porsches.

I could smell him, with the disgust I had previously reserved for things decayed, fly-worried fish in an alley. I descended. My wings brushed the arching branches of the redwoods. I felt gravity press my body into the mulch.

I scuttled awkwardly over the roots, decayed wood on my leather wings. I panicked. There was a pair of eyes across the creek, an animal snouting the air. I dragged over a rock, tumbling down the bank.

Stand
. I craved my old body, wanting to climb to my feet and take a human breath. But I was helpless, splashing into the water, swirling, struggling to get airborne.

Stand up
. The bones of my legs unfolded. Flesh cascaded down and around me, molding itself, joints, organs. My skull ballooned to its usual, human capacity. My vision faded, flattened, lost detail. My finger bones ached, metacarpals throbbing.

I opened my mouth, blinked. I took a breath, and let the air out, feeling my chest lift and fall. The pair of eyes in the brush watched me. Whatever sort of creature it was, it would not turn, would not run, backing slowly away.

I was clothed as I had been, jacket, shoes, the clothes oddly unstained. My shoes filled with stream water, the cuffs of my trousers getting wet. I bent low and lapped the water. I spat it out. To a living man perhaps this creek would have tasted refreshing, but to me it was a dilution of the roots and road cuts the water had traveled, the larvae already teeming somewhere in the canyons.

My quarry was nearby. He was in one of the cabins behind the trees, but I could not be certain which one. A radio alarm came on, mid-song, country and western music. The bronze tang of coffee drifted in the air.

I told myself to find him now, finish it.

I flexed my hands. A large bird swept all the way from the upper branches of a tree and perched on a stone across from me. The black beak parted. The bird spoke, a brief, ugly noise.

The crow was not hostile, but suspicious, curious. I made a noise, too, echoing his, but with an added twist: I belong.

The crow cocked his head. Perhaps he saw me as potential food, sensing in me something of the gibbet, a man left unburied as a warning. The large bird spread his wings and without seeming to make an effort glided all the way across the stream to my bank. His flight was lovely, the product of more efficient engineering. He dipped his head, fluttered his plumage, black feathers already blue with early day. He made no further sound. When he left me I felt the hardness of my solitude, how even the uncaring fellowship of a bird was welcome.

Hurry, I urged myself. There isn't time.

A jay laughed, coasting upward. Its feathers were blue, shocking blue—like something broken open, a gemstone, an exotic fruit. It was almost day. I held my breath, trying to sense him, where he lay sweating.