The Judas Glass (30 page)

I had hoped to protect her. “You won't be able to see the sunlight,” I said.

“You make it sound like good news.”

“You flew,” I said.

She was examining a redwood branch, the evergreen needles, the way leaf connected to twig, to frond, to the trunk, the tree sweeping upward. “I don't believe we can do that, Richard.”

“Then how did you get here?”

“You brought me.”

I smiled, shook my head.

She said, “I swam.”

“I think the first thing you wanted to do when you woke up was take wing, like a gull.”

“And I couldn't.”

Another motor brayed beyond the surf. I parted the shrubbery and gazed out across the beach. Our boat was brightly lit. Yellow rubber rafts were tied to it, and men climbed the cabin, leaned over the stern. It was hard to make out what they were doing at this distance, but it was easy to imagine the radios sputtering.

She said, “They're going to find us.”

45

We knelt beside the pawprints left by the fox. The stream spilled between two rocks, minnows asleep, each one flickering to stay in place.

A drop of blood gleamed on the stones. She could not stop herself from touching her forefinger to the blood and tasting it.

“Where is the fox?” she asked.

“He ran off, back to his foxy life,” I said, trying to make light of his shocked agony, the way he had stayed still for a moment when I released him. The way he leaped at last, parting the grass. There was a path, still, where he had escaped. “I didn't kill him.”

She put her fingers into a pawprint, lightly, and I could see her wondering about such prints, what it would be like to trot on four legs. She looked up and it took her a moment to find me because I had moved away from the stream, not wanting to see its pools empty of my reflection.

“But we do kill, don't we?” she asked.

As she bent over the stream I wanted to warn her. I couldn't keep the tension from my voice. “Carnivores take lives. Normal people eat meat.”

She asked the question with a tone of deliberate innocence. “Is that what we are—carnivores?”

Even here the sound of outboard motors reached us, and the demand of an amplified voice, too far off to be understood.

“The fox must be very weak,” she said. “If you took enough for both of us.” She fingered a pebble, balanced it in her hand. “I forgot how many different colors rocks can be. All these shades of red and—look at this!”

The fox was very weak, but I did not tell her that. It had fallen twice, grass whispering, before it crossed the meadow.

She reached into the stream, the water reflecting starlight. “I was listening to a baseball game in the front seat when we had the accident,” she said. “It was the last thing I remember seeing—the dials of the radio, my father's hands on the steering wheel. I don't think he really understood baseball. He wanted to, but it never made sense to him. I don't think he ever listened to another game after that.”

She plucked a flat green stone from the stream bed, and even in the dark of night it was easy to perceive the warm green, the way the rock was almost translucent, veined with dark.

“I think it was harder on my parents than it was on me. Because they had so much faith in life, expecting so much for their children. Especially my father—he's so self-willed. One cup of coffee in the morning, one glass of whiskey on New Year's Eve.”

I could hear it in her voice, how much she wanted to see them. “My mother had a cross made of stone like this,” she continued, “on a gold chain. It was the only jewelry she ever wore.” There was growing eagerness in her voice. “It's jade. And look at this—” She looked up at me with a smile, as though she had just proved something. “Agate—the color of your eyes.”

She was going to perceive what was missing soon, unless I drew her attention from the water. But she had turned back to it, searching it for stones.

“This is why composers write symphonies,” I said, trying to distract her with conversation. “Isn't this what music wants us to experience? This kind of life?”

“You mean, why play the piano when you can have a forest?”

“I didn't mean anything quite so extravagant. Besides, you'll have the piano, too.”

“I don't see how, Richard.” She leaped to her feet and took my hand, her fingers wet. “‘You'll have the piano, too,'” she said, a perfect imitation of my manner, the way I spoke, saving up my words and delivering them in a burst. “How can I tell my parents I'm alive—”

I tried to draw her away from the stream. “They'll be happy to hear from you.”

“If I
am
alive.”

I felt an urgent need to deny what she was saying. “You're as alive as you feel,” I said, responding to her probing with greeting-card wit.

“Can I call them on a telephone?”

“We can do everything we want to do.”
Come away
, I wanted to add. Come away and don't notice what is missing in the stream.

She grew pensive. “What's wrong, Richard?”

My laugh sounded forced.

But it communicated something to her. She turned from me, gazing back at the trickling water, and before I could stop her she broke away. She waded into the water, dropping to her knees. She crouched there, the water breaking and re-forming around her, gazing into the glittering stream.

Long afterward she did not speak. She would turn sometimes, and study her own footprints, how water flowed into them, how they filled with light from the sky.

“Tell me how I look,” she said at last.

With our mouths we swear to tell the truth, and with our mouths we lie. But when I kissed her now, feeling the fox-warmth that flushed her body, I no longer felt that I was touching Rebecca, the person I had once known. I was touching something more, something that I could name only with a shop-worn word, her spirit, her soul.

“Don't be afraid,” I whispered.

She shook her head and smiled, bemused, not understanding why I was so happy. “When you look at me,” she insisted, “what do you see?”

“Those hands I will always imagine on the keyboard. Or on me, on parts of my body. These.” I kissed her fingers, one by one. They call it
power of speech
because it
is
a power. For the moment it failed me.

“If we don't cast a reflection in water—” she began.

“Don't think about it.”

“—then we aren't real.”

“There's so much else we can do.” Meaning: if we can walk and talk we have to exist. It made sense, but I wasn't that happy with the argument.

She put her hand on my chest, a gesture she had always made during conversation, feeling my voice in my chest. This time it was to silence me. “Haven't you asked yourself why?”

“I ask myself every moment,” I said. “Why I inhale and exhale, why my heart beats. Feel it. Is it pumping blood, or is it just acting like a living heart, the way the image on a movie screen acts like a person?”

Of course I knew what we were. I would not let her questioning look break my feeling of resolve, of exhilaration. To prove something to her, to dismiss her inquiries, I vanished.

I folded my arms and when I spread them I was winged. She took a step back. Her eyes were alight with fear, her hair blown by the stroke of my wings. From far above the treetops I looked down, all I could see of her was a face and her pale hands; all I could hear was her voice calling my name.

When something makes no sense we assume we have misunderstood. When reality stumbles we blame ourselves for inattentiveness, for a false assumption. She abandoned her sight, eyes, and trusted only her other senses, reaching out for a fern, for the trunk of a tree.

Sometimes we expect to much of the ones we love. They can only think of what has been, not what we have become. The greeting, the plea, fail. From this height the Coast Guard cutter was made of light, whiteness shivering around it, the yellow rubber rafts glowing. Men cast lines to others on what had been our boat, the ropes invisible from here suddenly clear as a great beam of light from the bow of the Coast Guard cutter drenched the scene.

How long would we have, I wondered as I glided, settling down through the wet branches, the scent of earth rising up to me, the fragrance of the redwood bark and the centuries of redwood needles.

“Where did you go?” she asked in a whisper. I gestured upward, indicating the sky, but her eyes followed my hand, puzzled.

“Richard, don't do that again. Don't leave me.”

They searched that morning, a small army of dogs and men. They gave directions through transmitters, shifted the gears of off-road vehicles, flattened ferns, tread moss, muddied streams. Their hunt was a dream that pricked me during my hours of torpor, images of men pouring coffee from thermoses, taking binoculars from cases, focusing on the distance.

We had climbed a tree from inside. The trunk was charred, the broken vault of the redwood more than enough room for two creatures. The day passed as nights pass. Rebecca was nearby, and that was all that mattered.

It was late in the day when a dog found us. His tags tinkling, his panting echoing dully in the chamber of the tree, the big hound whined, yelped, standing on his hind legs to get closer to our hiding place.

His barking stirred me. The dog lunged, struggling upward, climbing. The dog was clawing upward, charcoal raining down the shaft of the tree. He fell, hard.

But he started in again. He barked, a peculiar, falsetto shrill. “He treed something,” said a voice.

“Idiot,” said another voice, as though the word were a sign of affection.

The dog made a strangling sound when they dragged him away, snorting, panting. Was it another dream that brought the dog back? No other dog was so persistent, no other dog so eager. He yelped. He pawed the charred inside of the tree. Surely, I thought dimly. Surely this wasn't happening.

It was almost sunset when a metallic sputtering broke into my trance. It was loud. It was close. A motor was kicking, failing.

There was nothing I could do. My arms, my legs, were lifeless. I could only listen, unable to shake myself awake. The engine rattled powerlessly, and then it caught, full-throated power.

I could not stir against this paralysis, this drowse that shackled me. The entire tree resounded. The air screamed.

A chain saw.

46

Men shouted to make themselves heard above the shriek of the power saw. The saw lowered in pitch, sputtering, almost stalling. It cut into the tree.

The cathedral trembled. I opened my eyes slowly. Any last hope that this was a dream died. I found myself standing, my arms crossed over my chest, on a gnarled shelf high in the interior of the wooden shaft. Below me was an oblong of light, an opening too narrow for most humans. The illumination that spilled into the tree was the color of sunset.

The saw stopped. Men cursed, a dog barked, not barking so much as a hysterical canine tirade—
There they are
. The saw puttered like a motorcycle, gained strength, and sliced into the wood.

There
they are!
Motor exhaust drifted upward. I would be able to shift my arm soon. The men worked feverishly, trying to race the setting sun. The bulk of the big tree trembled, echoing with a series of methodical blows. An ax. The sawdust smelled like cinnamon.

It didn't surprise me, I told myself. None of this surprised me.
Now
, I urged myself. Move your hand. Turn your head. Rebecca must have taken refuge higher in the tree. She must be hiding up near the tapering chimney open to the sky. Black dust sifted down from the interior. The scream of the saw shifted to a new position, and another saw stuttered and started up, the men working fast, sundown nearly here.

With copious effort I discovered movement in my right forefinger. And then, like someone doing complicated mental calculations, I moved the forefinger of my left hand.

I had experienced dreams like this, my closing arguments, the jury's impassive faces, my best three button suit, and my tongue would not work. My voice dead, my mind blank, my notes gibberish.

Hands tore the bark and light broke into the base of the tree. The dog leaped into the opening, and clawed, trying to climb the interior, barking crazily, his handler calling to him, the dog furious that he couldn't get at me.
Let me go. Let me sink my teeth into him
. He could taste me in his mind. How sluggish we seemed to this dog, how obstinate and stupid.
I've got him!

One of my hands reached upward and dug deep into the char opposite me. My other hand joined it, and I hung there, gradually climbing the shaft of the tree, toward the fading splash of sky. Rebecca was not here.

They dragged the dog out of the tree, the beast yammering, tearing at the soil. The ax blows resounded, and now there was a new pitch to each blow, splintering wood. Far below, at the base of the interior, a hand reached and missed, and tried again. The hand found a grip and with a great heave a section of the tree broke free.

I dug my fingers into the ancient charcoal, and thrust my head and shoulders through the top of the tree. The redwood was still alive, despite its hollow core. They were killing it, and I knew as I teetered there that Rebecca was in trouble. I couldn't see her, but I could tell.

Richard
—
help me
.

Joe Timm's face was gaunt, his eyes searching the ground with nothing of his old self-assurance. Two hundred miles out of his jurisdiction, he was not in charge of these people, but stood among them with natural authority as lights were switched on so the saws could finish their work.

Joe was unshaven. He wore a hunting jacket that hung loosely. He touched his mouth and rubbed his bristled chin, a habitual gesture, nervous. He put one hand on his hip, where a handgun, or a flask, offered him some security.

How is your wife?

Joe did not look up, but he took his hand away from his hip and stood like a man looking off the edge of a cliff. He bunched his fists. And then, only after a long moment, gathering strength, did he look up again.