The Judas Glass (24 page)

“I hope so.”

“Tell me—” She had to stop to take a breath. “Tell me why.”

He sounded almost patient when he said, “Please shut up.”

“He wasn't doing anything, Eric” She wanted to stop talking, but she couldn't, now that she had her breath. “We get people like this in the woods. Mental hospitals let them go.”

Eric
. I had always admired the name—it smacked of Norsemen, exploration of the high seas.

He said, “Go shut the children up.”

She didn't argue but stood where she was. Her hair was stringy, clotted.

My heart kept squeezing, at about the same rate as a crocodile's on a winter day. I felt systole, and blood gushed a little more feebly than before. My heart seemed permanently contracted. At last the muscle relaxed, and the valves in my chest fell silent for another age. So it was a sort of pulse, I consoled myself. There was so little fluid in my body that my eyelids dragged over my eyeballs, and stuck.

I managed to open one eye, barely. Eric wiped his hands and forearms on sheets of paper towel. The crumpled, sodden paper littered the floor. His voice was almost kind as he insisted, “Would you go tell the kids to shut up?”

The kids had fallen quiet. It was a shaky quiet, though, and what he meant was: go find out what they're doing.

When she was back in the room, he continued, “I'm going to cut this carpet out, the whole thing. It's cheap stuff, tell the landlord Randy puked on it. Go get me all the knives you have.” He was keeping his voice steady, but it was a pitch higher than it should have been.

She hurried from the room. A drawer opened, shut. Soon, I promised myself, I would move one of my hands. She pulled a new-looking Bowie knife from its sheath, the light from the steel reflecting on the ceiling.

“They don't make this kind of knife to cut up carpet. I told you to go get every kitchen knife in the house, all those fancy knives, every one of them.”

“They don't make those to cut up carpet, either.”

His voice was very quiet. “Go get the kitchen knives, Helen.”

He stood over me. He began to bend over to take my pulse but couldn't bring himself to touch me. He looked at me, then looked at the mess on the carpet. There was a dimple in his chin. He massaged one of his arms, kneading the muscle. I could read the look in his eyes: maybe he should get the ax again.

She came back with a handful of blades, dropping one on the floor. I could contract my right hand, make a fist, release it. He selected a long butcher knife with a wooden handle. It was the wrong knife for the job, and his hands kept slipping off the hilt. He made a grunt of effort, stabbing the carpet. He worked on his knees, cutting, sawing. “Move that chair out of the way.”

“Let me do it,” she said.

“I have to use your car. Go out to mine and get the gas can from the trunk. Put it in the backseat of the Chevy.”

She was gone a long time, and twice he rose to his knees and listened. There was the sound of a trunk opening, the slosh of fuel in a can. By now I could wiggle all my fingers. My severed tendons shuddered. Soon, I promise myself, I would try to shift my head.

She entered the room again, flushed, panting. He knelt to his work, slicing the carpet, tearing it. “What are the kids doing?” he asked.

“I told them to dry off and get into their jammies.”

There was silence from the bathroom, the tub empty. It seemed his attack had never happened, except as a forgotten, faded prologue to the sound of carpet tearing. “You better use
this
knife,” she said.

He accepted it from her. The work went more quickly. There was a thought-out non-logic to everything they did; as long as they had some sort of plan he wouldn't hit her again. “You told me I could stay here, and you promised you wouldn't ask a zillion questions. You liked it, didn't you. A man with secrets.”

Her voice hard, she said, “He's still alive.”

“He can't be.”

She said, “Look at his eyes.”

He glanced at me, made himself give me a long look. She was on her hands and knees, gathering fragments of a porcelain dog.

“You can clean that up later. Tell the kids to hurry up and get into bed. I'm going to take a shower, change my clothes. I'm going for a drive. I want you to promise me something.”

She didn't respond.

He held the knife, pressing the ball of his thumb against the blade. The flesh of his thumb was indented in a fine line where the steel pressed it. “I'm sorry I hit you,” he said. “I need you to promise me something.”

She said, “I think his foot moved.”

“Can you promise me, Helen?”

“I don't know what I'm going to tell the kids happened out here.” She sounded firm, but not as sure of herself as she wanted to be, an elementary school teacher refusing to panic. “Randy already asked and I told him to mind his own business. I believe in being frank with children.”

He fell into the easy chair. He shook his head, meaning: let me rest a minute. He grunted and, without getting up, drew the handle of the ax toward the chair.

Once during a tour of the Natural History Museum in San Diego, my father and I were shown into a library by a smiling, white-haired woman. The woman made me feel terribly shy. At the time I had no idea why, in that lack of self-knowledge peculiar to children. I realized later when I saw her photograph in a magazine that she was beautiful, refined. She and my father made what I ignored as medical chit-chat. So when a certain drawer was pulled out I was unprepared. I should have been warned, but both adults had ignored me, joking about money and politics, the dead language of adulthood.

A strange map spread before us on the blue felt Ivory-yellow, a fine net stretched outward, a web of highways, a ghostly city in the the shape of a human body. “A nervous system,” said my father. “Belonged to a cleaning woman. She left it to the museum.” The nerves of the dead woman were busy around the empty hole of her mouth.

It was appropriate that my most stark confrontation with the architecture of the body and my first insight into the power of a bequest should occur at the same moment. In the boiler plate and codicils of a will, the dead stand witness among us. In the macrame of the nervous system something of the cleaning woman remained faithful.

“I'm worried,” Helen said, tugging paper towels from the roll. “About the psychological damage to Diane, especially. I have that plastic liner on the mattress from her bedwetting—”

“And milk gives Randy a rash,” said Eric.

She let the roll of paper towels fall. The cylinder of paper touched the swamp of blood and pink began to spread across the green-and-white floral print. I felt her anxiety. It passed through me like pain:
He's going to use the ax. He's going to hurt her.
She said, “I promise.”

He heard it—wet fabric whispering. One hand felt for the ax handle. His fingers made sticky, kissing sounds on the wooden shaft.

She said, “He's moving.”

After this was over, I promised myself, I would give my body to medical science. The graduate students would file in not ready to believe, every one of them doubting. Even as I stepped to the lectern and opened my notes they would not know what they were looking at. And I could tell them that memory is the cruelest faculty, the first, most lasting form of torture.

I was so careful to deceive myself.

36

A house plant gleamed in a clay pot. The dark green foliage, the glaze of salts on the pot, the farmland scent of the potting soil—it was all so out of place where it was, beside a tattered pack of playing cards on a table. The ceiling was sheet rock—a plant has such power that it will ascend even toward a sky of stone.

There was blood on the ceiling. I rose from the rug slowly, section by section, with the movements of an elderly dandy, straightening the crease in my damp trousers, adjusting my cuffs, steadying my head with the gesture of a man with one hand on his hat.

Helen looked on with something like rapture. If I was alive, she knew, then the future held all manner of stunning possibilities. My presence worked in her like oxygen. She wanted to touch me. But at the same time she recognized that there was something grotesque about me, something terrible.

Eric was sweating. He stood with the ax in one fist like a berserker about to jump from a great height. My neck muscles cramped, veins fitfully reasserting themselves. I wavered dizzily, so feeble that my movements were the slow, languid gestures of someone swimming through zero gravity.

When he hefted the ax again, it took me a long time to lift my arm, the deltoid muscles of my shoulders weak, my forearm strengthless. I slipped the blow, and he staggered into it, landing on all fours. The house plant in the corner shook, stem and leaf.

He flung the ax away and scrambled. He snatched something bright off the drenched carpet. The nap of the rug squeaked and squelched under our feet. He passed at my belly with the hunting knife. I saw how he must have borne down on Rebecca, how little she could have guessed about him, how helpless she had felt.

I took him into my arms as the knife slashed me, tearing my shirt, my skin, the muscles of my belly. “Get the ax,” he cried, yelling, full-throated.

He stabbed me, working hard, plunging the knife, ripping my jacket, tangling the blade in the cloth, fumbling, losing it as it tumbled to the floor. He told her to pick the ax off the floor. “Use the ax.”

I laughed, a little sadly. I had wanted an adversary.

“His legs,” he was gasping. “Hit him in the legs.”

We rocked in a silent waltz. He had been young once. Music had meant so much to him. But he had always been coarsened by ambition, stubborn in ways that made him tireless when he should have rested, industrious when he should have walked beside the river, watching the leaves turn from green to scarlet with something almost audible, that sound like held breath.

He knew this now: he had hurried to the bulletin board, across the plaza with its red and white umbrellas, the pigeons, the white crumbs of bread. He wanted to see the scores, to see where his name appeared on the roster of the gifted.

He was not the first human being to want too much. He fought me, fists, kicks, with all the loud bravado of a theatrical double, a man pretending to be in danger, miming a death-struggle, his voice draining to a shrill, piping
No
.

He was senseless when I killed him, unpacking his body of its organs with the careful concentration I would have used on a trunk full of curiosities, heart, lungs, the pipes and ducts of food and air, until there was so little left of the living man, so little structure, that I had to stop my dismantling and attend to her.

She was crouched at the door of the bathroom, and continued to scream when I touched her cheek soothingly. What she had just seen had broken through her joy at my presence.

There was nothing I could do to quiet her, so I pressed my fingers over her eyes and told her to sleep. I draped her over the quilt on her bed, a sailboat pattern, an heirloom, beautiful, stitch by stitch.

The children hid in the bathtub. They wore pink pajama bottoms, and each wore a T-shirt representing a superhero.

Sleep
. I did them no harm. Their bodies were warm in my arms as I carried them one by one to the bedroom, toys all over the floor and a few ants around the sticky half circle left by a can of cola.

And now, Rebecca would say, you are going to turn yourself in. Now you will call Dr. Opal.

Because it was over. I had accomplished everything I had set out to do.

I wiped blood off the phone with a paper towel and told the operator I wanted to speak with Berkeley Chief of Police Joe Timm. Instead I was connected to the Berkeley Police Department, a woman's voice.

It was only after persisting and getting the answering machine in Joe Timm's private office that I remembered a fragment of a phone number. I tried various combinations of digits, and when I heard Joe Timm's voice at last I felt a flicker of satisfaction.

This was miles from Joe's jurisdiction, but he would know what to do. “I found Eric,” I said.

“Eric,” he said, almost guessing what I was talking about, almost recognizing my voice. “Who is this?”

“He killed Rebecca,” I said.

“Where are you?” said Joe, mystified, but thinking fast.

Joe was asking questions as I put the receiver down beside an ashtray, a bowl of blue glass. The sound of his tiny, electrified voice followed me until I was outside. I washed myself with a garden hose, but the effort wasn't really necessary. Even my appearance seemed to regenerate, my clothing healing as inexorably as my flesh.

As I turned off the water, twisting the handle of the garden faucet, a woman stepped out of the shadows, a man behind her. “We heard noises,” said the woman. “We almost called the police.”

“Yes, it was a little noisy in there, wasn't it?” I said. The melancholy I should have expected was setting in. I could stop now—stop everything, and step off this one-man merry-go-round. I had done everything I wanted. I could wait here for the call to be traced, for the police to roll up and take me in.

Neither of the neighbors were afraid. They were dazzled by my smile, trusting me to join them, go with them back into their bungalow. “We just wondered if everything was alright,” said the woman, softening her voice seductively. Her accent reminded me of Connie's, a country twang modified by years of watching television.

“Everything
is
all right,” I said.

I liked these people, the man in a baseball cap and jeans, the shapely woman in a plaid blouse. I could go back and play Scrabble. They would have been delighted to let me win, letting me make up words, all x's and q's, and for a while I even walked back with them the woman taking my arm, leaning close to me, the man trailing, honored by my attraction for his wife, willing to participate in a night of voluntary cuckoldry, watching George Raft talk tough while I took my pleasure in the bedroom. And I nearly walked up the steps with them, almost closed the door behind me.