Waking the Dead (36 page)

“What do you want to say about her, Fielding?” said Stanton softly.

“Is she alive, Father? Please tell me.”

I waited for his answer. I could hear his soft, calm breaths. Finally, I opened my eyes. He was still holding my hand, looking at me with enormous pity.

“She is alive in the hearts of those of us who loved her. And beyond that, there is something greater. She is with God.”

I took my hand away from him. “I followed her into this church, Father Stanton.” I tried to set my face so I would look strong. I wanted to look very, very strong after saying a thing like that.

Father Stanton came toward me. His image seemed unstable, like something reflected in a very old mirror.

“Fielding,” he said, shaking his head. He put his arm around my shoulder and I just stood there, accepting his mercy and staring off into the darkness.

12

S
ARAH WAS BACK
from Chile and I was racing home to her from New York, where I’d been celebrating my father’s retirement. I got the last plane out and it was empty except for the crew and for me. I remember feeling in my isolation like a president on his own private jet and somehow that felt better than feeling what I really was—a man racing back to his lover with the knowledge growing within him that he was losing her. I was stubborn but I was not a fool: now that she was back from her mission into the steely heart of Chile, I knew that Sarah would need me that night and the next night, too, but I also knew that she was turning and that she was ready to steer her life in a direction I could not possibly follow. It seemed to be just a matter of time. That we had found each other in the first place and managed to stay together for so many, many months seemed in the roaring darkness of that flight home to be a perfect happy accident and now the laws of emotional entropy were asserting themselves. Sarah and I, I thought, were like rockets that had been shot up from the launching pads of childhoods a thousand miles apart. The trajectories of our flights had crossed for a time and we had flown in tandem—but now suddenly our paths were diverging. I could see Sarah cutting her way through space, even as she—or was it I?—got farther and farther away.

In truth, I felt humbled by her bravery, both horrified and awestruck over the choices she was making. It was a terrible blow— this feeling she was becoming, in her own eyes certainly and even to an extent in mine, my spiritual superior. It was a feeling I had carried within me in one form or another all of my life.

In college, I knew a boy who took mescaline five times a week. In a short while he was talking about theories of human electrical energy, angry molecules in the air, hot spots in Harvard Yard, but even as I witnessed his degeneration—the Frosted Flakes in his knitted beard, the staring empty eyes—I could not help but feel a nagging suspicion that he had discovered something I needed to learn and would never be able to. It was akin to what I’d always felt about Danny, who conducted his affairs on a high wire without a net, and it was what I’d always felt about Caroline—with her easy grace under pressure, and her ability to toss out her most tender feeling like a red rose off the side of a ship. For a time, I had felt Sarah and I were exact spiritual equals—conspirators, really. The usual: laughed at the same jokes, noticed the same oddballs hiding in the crowd, were easily aware of the imperfections and even the unavoidable residue of innate human rot that lay at the bottom of every motive, every gesture. We were not angels; we would let the phone ring no matter what brokenhearted soul might have been calling. And we were perfect lovers for each other, too. We went at it with the same sense of risk. We both longed to cut loose from the self we wore like a regulation uniform out into the everyday world. With me deep inside her, Sarah writhed and clutched and it seemed the bones in her face opened a little. I mean her face changed, it truly changed, and I saw a Sarah no one else knew, not even herself, except through me, and this simple, elemental, spacious knowledge bound us: it was the most real and unadorned thing I had ever known and she knew it about me, too. We were each other’s pathways into ourselves and we were young enough and vain enough to care about that.

But it was an era, a time of our lives, and returning home to her that night I realized it was coming to an end. It had probably been changing long before that night, but this was the first time I could let myself see it—up there in the darkness inside that little pressurized tube, with the nozzle of light pouring out of the overhead reading lamp and onto the book that remained closed in my lap. I knew that our embraces would be different, and with that knowledge came a deeper, sadder knowledge—that they already had changed. We were not only holding each other, but holding on to each other, and I covered my eyes and squeezed them shut and there was a thud, a little jolt, but that was only my book slipping off my lap into the darkness that swirled like smoke around my feet.

We were awfully glad to see each other but it wasn’t long after her return from Santiago that we began to fight. They weren’t only the ordinary fights that lovers have. We were discovering the places in which our paths were dividing and each discovery made us a little more desperate, a little meaner. Behind both of us was a pit of sanctimony. I had all the dreadful assumptions of male supremacy luring me back—that LaBrea of wounded pride and obsession with my own path. And Sarah had behind her the equally alluring trap of feeling absolutely that she was no longer speaking just for herself but for God.

The only time after her trip to Chile that she held me as tightly as I wanted her to was a few weeks later when she awoke from a nightmare. It was just past daylight and she rolled toward me and put her hands on my shoulders, her leg between my thighs, her breasts flat and hard against my chest. She was wearing a pajama top and she was naked beneath that. Her pubic hairs were matted and hard around her opening. As she stirred, the scent of our having made love the night before also stirred, as if it had been trapped beneath the bedclothes like a cloud. “Please wake up,” she said. “Please.” She was cold with panic. Her eyes were immense and seemed devoid of any human intelligence. Her breath was brackish but it would be wrong to say merely I didn’t mind when in fact I liked it: all signs of her reality, the overpowering truthfulness of her body, struck a chord of gratefulness and desire in me. I felt a twinge of regret each time she bathed.

“I was in a chair,” she was saying. “And then the chair fell into something, a hole in the ground, the floor. I guess I was in a house. It was so quiet. Just—I don’t know. Just so quiet. When the chair started falling I thought, Oh-oh, they got me. But I didn’t think it was serious. I figured I could get out of it. But then I realized if I got out of the chair I’d be in blackness, nowhere, and I would still keep falling. So I just held on and there was terrible noise, like a train coming into a station, like a subway, getting louder and louder, and I wanted so much to hold my ears but if I let go of that chair then I’d be sucked into space and that’s when I realized what had happened. I was dying.”

“Yikes,” I said, caressing her face. I could feel how much she needed me just then and my heart was pounding. I wanted somehow to seize this moment and use it as a rudder to change our course.

“Yikes? After all your studies with the great Harvard professors, this is what I get? I want to know what you think it means.”

“Your dream?” I held her closer still. A little umbrella of air suddenly opened between us where she moved her stomach away from mine. I slid next to her again. “I think your dream means you think your life is dangerous but you don’t know how to get out of it.”

“Is that what you believe? Honestly?”

“Honest injun.”

“That’s a disgusting phrase.”

“Sarah, it’s seven o’clock in the morning. I can say anydring I want to.”

That evening we went to Resurrection House for a dinner in honor of Francisco and Gisela Higgins. Francisco Higgins had been part of the Chilean delegation to the United Nations and then Chilean ambassador to Mexico during the Allende regime. After the coup when the generals took over the government, Higgins had been arrested, along with thousands of others. He was beaten, tortured, yet later he maintained he was among the lucky ones. There was an international protest on his behalf and the generals had him released from the prison on Dawson’s Island. He was expelled from Chile, along with his wife, who had been under house arrest all of that time. They moved to Cuba, then to Romania, and then to Mexico City. Now they were in the United States, following a lengthy battle with U.S. Immigration. Both Francisco and Gisela had accepted positions with something called the Christian Ecumenical Conference on Latin America. They had an office in a building in Washington that was filled with tiny foundations. They were in Chicago now on their way to Minnesota, where Francisco was going to speak at the university about the Allende experiment and after that they were both going to give a talk at a church in St. Paul called Our Lady of the Miracle. What I did not know was that Sarah would be going with them.

On the way to Resurrection House Sarah and I stopped at a little peeling wooden shack over which loomed a large painting of a primitive-looking hot dog—a hot dog fit for a Katzenjammer Kid. We bought twenty hot dogs, each wrapped in waxed paper along with a pickle and a handful of soggy fries. The mustard and relish showed through the opaque paper like a deep bruise. Though all he was serving was hot dogs and Pepsis, the old fellow who worked the counter wore a chef’s cap. His eyes were small dark bullet holes, his face misshaped and unshaved. He looked like a madman pretending to be a famous cook.

“What a crazy-looking guy,” Sarah said as we carried the sacks of frankfurters back to the car. We were parked beneath a street lamp and snow poured past the light.

“What if he is Jesus?” I asked.

She stepped on my toe. Hard.

I wasn’t used to Sarah’s other neighborhood at night and as we drove through the narrow brown streets, with the boarded-up windows, the Salem ads in Spanish, the unexpected vacant lots, the unseen but palpable sense of contested turf, I felt a wild swing of impatience. I may not have been raised in the lower depths, but I knew more about treacherous neighborhoods than Sarah did: her courage suddenly seemed like a kind of willful, perpetual half-blindness. She may have been leagues braver than I was, but my caution was born at least in part of experience and her courage was born at least in part of sheer inexperience. The horror of Sarah’s childhood was that her father was a moneygrubber, that her sisters were synthetic, thoughtless, that her grandparents had slave-master mentalities. It was a lot to recoil from—but it prepared you for a life of poetry, not for a life on the streets.

“It’s very grim around here, Sarah. I hate the thought of you walking these streets at night.”

“I’m careful.”

“I’m sure you’re not. There are at least a thousand guys in this neighborhood who could rape you and not feel the slightest remorse.”

“That kind of thinking makes me sick. And it’s so
annoying
. You can see where it leads. With the world in flames, I’m not going to decide to be a shut-in.”

“I’m not asking you to stay home. It’s just a matter of accepting reality.”

“Why is it always a certain kind of person who asks you to accept reality?” Sarah asked.

“Is that what you think I am?”

“No. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. It was dumb. I just don’t know why you’re saying things like that. You know this is where my work is. It’s not going to do me any good to be afraid all the time. And I don’t want to feel like an alien.”

“I only want you to be safe.”

“It’s not enough. Not when I want so much more.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if someone attacked you.”

“Male fantasy time. Anyhow, the truth is, people around here know who I am. And whatever else you might think about them—”

“I don’t think anything about them. What are you making me out for?”

“Whatever else, they’re very religious. They think of me practically as if I were a nun.”

“There’s a case right now, right here in town, about two guys who attacked a nun, a fifty-eight-year-old nun, kept her prisoner in an abandoned building, raped her innumerable times, and then cut off her fingers and carried them around in a little box, showing them to their friends.”

“Why did you have to tell me that?”

“Because it’s true, it happened.”

“I think the kind of work you’re going into is much more deadly than whatever I’m doing,” Sarah said. “It just warps your view of everything. Deals, crimes, bargains—I don’t know how you expect to remain a human being.”

“I’ll leave it to you to keep me straight,” I said.

I said it quickly. We seemed to have established a pace: tough talk, bang bang bang. But suddenly Sarah broke the rhythm. It made everything a little more awful when she stopped to consider what she was going to say: off the cuff, anything could be overlooked, but in the silence I knew that what she said next was really going to count. “That’s more than I can do, Fielding. I can’t accept that responsibility.”

“Then I’ll just have to change
you,
” I said, making it fast again.

She looked at me and then shook her head. And then she looked away. I took a deep breath; the car stunk of hot dogs and mustard.

The hot dogs were in honor of Francisco and Gisela. They adored Yanqui junk food. During the Allende years, Francisco and Gisela had come to Chicago—Francisco to lecture at Roosevelt University on Chile’s Path to Democratic Socialism and Gisela to open an exhibition of Chilean weavings. They had somehow been served a meal of Carl’s Vienna Hot Dogs and this time they’d sent advance word that they were looking forward to the same type of meal.

Before Allende, Francisco had been a lawyer, dividing his practice between plutocratic friends of the family and
los pobres
from the tin shantytowns on the outskirts of Santiago. Gisela was a cellist. She had studied for years with Pablo Casals and a recording she made years before called “The Romantic Cello Music of Spain” continued to sell: it attained the status of moody, left-wing makeout music.