The Judas Glass (38 page)

I knew what it was, the first sound, the first muffled crash. I knew what it was, and I knew exactly what would happen next. Connie looked up at the ceiling, one hand holding her bandaged eye, the other over her heart.

I spoke gently, even a little sadly. “Connie, get out of the house.”

“I won't let you.”

“Please, Connie. I don't want you to get hurt.”

“Is this what you wanted, standing around asking about whether or not my eyeball was ever going to grow back? I'm not going to surrender to you like everybody else in the world, Richard.”

She stumbled on the stairs. She hung on to the banister. I wrestled her out of the house, onto the dark lawn. She was noisy, kicking, scratching. I had to be careful to be quick and at the same time not hurt her. She struggled, and I felt her kicking and twisting in my arms.
A baby
—
there's a baby in her womb
.

When I turned back to the house the curtains were alight. There was a
huff
, a gentle explosion, and the scent of kerosene.

57

The wind was rising. Another breathy explosion blew out windows. I ducked involuntarily to avoid flying glass.

The explosions were hushed, the sound of splintering and fragmenting louder than the blasts. I had trouble pushing open the front door, the animal-pattern rug bunching, jamming the entrance. Already I could feel the heat.

Connie leaped onto my back. I shook her off, as gently as I knew how.

“Richard, don't go in there,” Connie pleaded. “Please don't go in there, Richard—please stay out here with me.”

She was clawing at me, and when I crossed the living room I dragged her with me. “I won't let you
do
this.”

“I don't want to hurt you.” I had to shout, fire thundering.

“I don't care about the mirror.” Her one healthy eye reflected flames. “I don't care about the house. You
planned
this.”

Fire oozed down the stairs. Connie was crying, stumbling after me into the smoke. “And I'm not going to lose you again, Richard.” She was screaming to be heard. “What kind of a life do you think I'm going to have after this? What kind of life do you think I'm going to have for my baby?”

I swept Connie outside. Her bandage was smouldering, and her blouse twinkled, fine points of vermillion streaming smoke. I found the brass nozzle and pulled hard, straightening the garden hose. I drenched her while she sprawled, cursing me, telling me nothing that happened to her mattered anyway.

“I don't want it,” she said. “I want to reach in there and tear it out.” She was bawling now, and I knelt beside her.

“Please keep the baby,” I said.

“It doesn't mean anything,” she said.
It
.

“Have the baby,” I said. I intended this as my farewell, my summation.

“You care! That's what you want—a baby! It's wonderful, Richard, to find this out after all these years. You wanted children. I could have had children, Richard. It wasn't my fault. It was
you
. This is Steve's baby, Richard. It isn't yours.”

“It doesn't matter who the father—”

“No, it doesn't. It's a human baby, right, Richard? Is that what you think? If you stay out here with me I'll have the baby,” she said, her fingers digging into my arm. “You go in there and it's all finished, Richard. It's not just you. You always thought you were the center of the world. But what about
me
?”

I was on my feet but she hung on, a sleeve ripping. I slapped her. I tried to be gentle. Even hurting Connie a little caused me pain, and I knew it was too late in the story of our lives to change anything.

Sleep, Connie. Rest.

I left Connie lying on the dark lawn, one arm outflung as she lay in a daze. Her position was almost that of a person holding out a telephone,
It's for you
. The hose was on full force, the brass nozzle lifting and tossing beside her.

The smoke was solid, filling the living room. I closed my eyes. I found the stairs and took three steps at a bound, and then the fire swallowed me. The heat was not what slowed me. I made myself not feel it.

My clothes writhed around my body, pant legs alive, jacket sleeves aflame. The smell of my seared flesh filled my lungs, and then my lungs were finished, each breath cauterizing the air sacs. I made my way into the room, wading against a tide, the floor waist-high with flames.

I called her name. The fire streamed around me, wind pouring through the broken windows.
Richard, stay away
. Did she say this, or did one of her thoughts reach me, like a cry from a shore?

I think I saw her once more, before my eyes were lashed by the fire and I lost all vision. She sat cross-legged, breaking the looking glass into fragments against the floor, at the bottom of a pool of light.

The ruptured spheres of hurricane lamps crunched underfoot. I could feel the satisfying grind of glass turning back into sand as I made my way, but the fire was deafening. Did she speak to me, once, parting her lips to utter flame? Or was I blind by then, imagining the scene, creating a mental image of the room so I could grope my way?

By the time I reached her she was gone. Her bones were a wooden cradle someone had cast into the bonfire, furniture no one would ever need again.

I told her I loved her. Or I tried to, with what was left of my organs of speech. I pressed my hands over the remains of the shattered mirror. She had done her work well.

Glass doesn't burn. It bubbles, and fuses. Fire transforms it, turning it into cysts of silica.

58

There must be a vocabulary in the body that we never have to learn. Even in a coma there must be a monument-lined avenue, a capital city—what we really are. The executive mansion, its empty windows. The obsolete automobiles are few, the cars of our childhood, of all childhoods. Because when I was not a body anymore, was barely a skeleton, I still felt that there was something left, a trellis within the ivy, bones within the bones.

But of course I had always known this story, always known how it would end, even as I felt it not ending at all, a new chapter falling open, ancient—new only to me.

I had the dimmest sense of what was happening. Dr. Opal was consoling a weeping woman. He was telling her that the more you know the less you understand. I tried to take solace in this dream, my life leafing open before me, a collection of postcards.

Here was a street. Here was a sycamore, the patchy beige and green of its bark. How could I know this? I couldn't see, I could not walk. This was one of those last visions, what my life was like.

Water rose up around me. I lurched on tattered stilts, and fell. I lay at the bottom of a spill of running water. My bones disarticulated in the gentle flow. The sharp pebbles and the jagged minerals of my body intermingled.

Let me imagine that I remember sirens, fire trucks in the distance. It may be true. But it was impossible for me to receive any sound clearly, there was too little of me left. Minnows probed me, finding some nourishment in residue, in char. They were hungry. Their mouths were like the ends of mechanical pencils, the lead drawn in, leaving the hard, round holes.

There must have been some reason the early recordings were manufactured in the form of black disks, plates fused by craftsmanship into circles. Recordings on cylinders could have been practical, but it was a general consensus that these black dishes of music were more appealing.

I think it was because you could see the entire piece of music at a glance, or feel it with your fingertips. Here was the groove where the song began, and here, at the label, was where it ended. And there was that circle around the label where the needle could spiral inward and bump and bump until the hand freed it, the circle of jittery silence that begins and ends all music.

How many nights passed? How many times did I seek and find what I needed from the living?

I always returned to the creek, the sandbag-lined bank, the horsetail reeds, the drainage pipes, all of it familiar to my touch even though I could not see.

This blindness was a familiar country. The sound of a 'possum's tail dragging as the animal crept through the reeds to its burrow was as clear to me as a spoken word. Each whisper named itself.

The sandbags had been filled with a mixture of sand and cement long ago. Now the canvas sacking was season by season wearing through, the inner core of concrete all that was left.

One evening I could see again.

I did not know what it was I was looking at, only that soon it would resolve itself, like a screen supervised by an absentminded projectionist. There were reeds. Reeds and a creek, and a family of marsupials, their pink snouts, their pink eyes, gazing back at me.

The 'possums were too hungry to be shy. The larger one crouched over a corn cob. But they were curious, and did not move. I found myself able to speak. First a whisper, “Don't worry. I won't hurt you.”

They didn't even know enough to be afraid, these pink, snouty creatures. But perhaps they sensed something in me, some harmlessness that was a part of their landscape, like the water and the reeds. They began to share the bare cob, gnawing it into chunks.

I wandered back to the site, the black scribbles that had been a house. A few scraps had been raked from the blackened geometry, a rind of carpet, electronic equipment fused and glittering. I whispered Rebecca's name over the last place I had seen her, where the poplar roots were exposed above the trampled, ashy lawn.

But I did not linger there beside the snaking branches of the daphne, the trowel still in place, thrust into the mossy ground. I had somewhere to go.

I did not remember these streets—but I knew where I was.

These thoroughfares were oddly familiar, short, steep driveways, houses with painted wooden shutters that would not close, ornamental, and gardens of neatly clipped lawns and ferns. It was a street of ferns, fuchsias, rows of begonias.

I crossed a lawn, and found my way up the front steps to a door with a pleasing, tongue-and-handle door latch. The brass was warm, familiar. Closing my hand around it filled me with happiness.

This was a house I had never visited. But
I
knew exactly where to turn, where to find my way across a hall, my footsteps hushed by the firm nap of a carpet Bookshelves, an African violet, the walls uncluttered, everything simple, spare, tidy.

I knew this place.

Only the piano surprised me. I had expected a spinnet, a compact, handsome piano of no great musical quality but the sort of instrument for which one develops affection. Instead, here was a baby grand, a Steinway.

I nearly laughed out loud. Of course, the spinnet had been sold years ago, and this Steinway had been here ever since. I could find my way here with my eyes closed.

It's easy to forget the beauty of a piano, the cream, the black. The hand almost does not want to interrupt the perfection. The pond is still. The fish sleep. The fingertips try to break the surface without flawing the peace.

Before I made a sound I warned myself that I could not do this.

I began to play, my hands finding the keys, my feet the pedals. I remembered the
Fantasie
only as I caused it to sound. It was like waking the music from a long sleep, from a coma, from a silence the music itself always resides in, a room beyond human habitation.

But I was in that room, playing the music I had been afraid I would never perform again, my hands knowing—a little stiff, but losing the stiffness with each heartbeat.

I played the music that would awaken my parents. I sensed them stir, sensing their disbelief, their love. They woke, and came through the house to the room where I sat playing Chopin in my sky blue gown.

59

“We knew you would come back,” said my father, in a shaky whisper. He put his arms around me in the sudden lamplight.

How did you know? I wanted to ask. How could you have so much faith?

But I could only look at him, actually seeing him for the first time in years. The light was very bright. I ran my fingers over the folds in his face, his mustache, his eyebrows while my pupils adjusted to this new glare, the gleam from the black satin of the Steinway.

How weathered he looked! Not like the wiry, smooth-faced young man I recalled, drying while Mother washed, folding the towel afterward with strong, slender fingers. But he looked wonderful—keen and joyful.

He wore the bathrobe I had given him one Christmas. I knew its feel, soft cotton, but I was surprised at the plaid, black and yellow. One pocket had been mended, the thread black, the stitches fine, my mother's work. My mother was in the doorway, not coming any closer, her hands clasped.

They had prayed for this. Not before dinner, one of the Presbyterian blessings over broken bread, but privately, after the service had ended and the church emptied, in the evening, the Bible closed.
If it be Thy will
.

But a visitation like this could never have His blessing. Why didn't I tell them that it wasn't really me? Why didn't I tell them that I was an image of their daughter, not Rebecca at all?

“I can't stay,” I said, my voice soft, calm. My parents were quiet and exact, trusting the syncopation of events. I wanted to protect them from what was happening. Still, it sounded so harsh in my ears.
I'm here, but I'm gone
.

“Of course you can't stay,” said my father, easily adjusting to this new reality, or trying to. Besides, the implications of my visit shook even my father. They loved me, but I should not be alive.

Home
. These walls, this familiar rug I had not seen since childhood, my grandmother's prized Persian, the only florid object in the house. And even it was handsome rather than ornate, masculine, puritan grays, pale desert-browns. “But you know how much I've wanted to see you.”

“We know exactly,” he said. “And anything we can do to help you now we will do. We're your family, Rebecca. You know what that means.”