White Apples (4 page)

Bernie's eyes widened in trapped-like-a-rat alarm. He backped•aled away from Coco fast.

"Can we go now, Vincent? I'm getting cold out here." She gestured around them, taking in the whole city and the growing crowd that seemed to have gathered for the specific purpose of staring.

"Yes! Get us out of here."

Before he'd finished speaking, they were back in her bedroom. It was warm and dark and still funky smelling from their good sex not so long before.

"What am I supposed to do, Coco? What do you want me to do?"

She watched him but said nothing. Her silence was intimidating (especially in light of what she had just done), but not threatening. Ettrich knew for certain that she was waiting for him to figure out what to do next. Clueless, he felt for his pulse again and couldn't bear the fact there was nothing beneath his skin to certify that he was alive.

He remembered what it was like having a pulse. How it would thump hard in his throat when he was nervous at a business meeting or putting the first serious moves on a woman. If he lay on his left side in bed he could hear its dull double drumbeat, a sound that always made him vaguely uneasy.

We know the heart is there, we know the blood is there. But hearing the lub-dub of our pulse reminds us that we are only chug•ging machines and there is little godlike or immortal about our makeup.

Feeling his silent wrist now, he looked at it a long time as if trying to remember something. He took a deep, deep breath and let it out slowly, saying, "Man! Man oh man oh man..." As he said it he could hear a doorbell ringing way in the back of his mind's house. Some part of him went to answer it. Standing there larger than life was the word "Man" and behind it the name Mann: Bruno Mann.

It took a moment for it to sink in. Ettrich looked at Coco and said the name. She remained impassive but was clearly waiting for him to continue.

"If Bruno is dead but I saw him, then he's in the same situation as me. And you were talking to him in the restaurant. You said I came back to life the moment I saw you." One of the candle flames on her dresser sputtered. Ettrich glanced up and licked his bottom lip while his mind caught its breath and moved to the next thought. "So it's probably true with
everyone
this happens to—you meet them the moment they come back." Now he was talking out loud to himself.

Coco was there but she was not as important as his own understanding. "I've got to find Bruno and talk to him about it." He tapped one index finger against the other and kept doing it. Things were becoming clearer; a plan was emerging. "Obviously you're not going to tell me more. So I've got to find him and compare notes. That's a plan. That makes sense, right?"

He looked up from his tapping fingers but Coco was no longer there. He remembered her saying she was cold. He assumed she'd gone to put on something warm. He sat there making a mental list of things to do next. He didn't feel good but he felt better. Ettrich was a pragmatist. He had more questions for Coco but was pretty sure she wouldn't answer them. He would just have to figure these things out on his own.

But there was one thing he had to know before he could pro•ceed and only she could answer it for him. He couldn't go on with his planning until she gave him some kind of answer. Suddenly impatient, he stood and went to find her.

For a Guardian Angel or Grim Reaper or spirit or whatever she was, Coco chose to live in a pretty meager apartment. One bed•room, a living room that doubled as a dining room, kitchen, bath•room, basta. It took Ettrich all of two minutes to walk through her place and discover she was gone. It didn't even surprise him. He could only shrug. What did it mean? Was she gone for good or had she just disappeared for now?

A white couch sat under a window in her living room. In front of it was a round glass table. Ettrich saw two things lying on it he knew hadn't been there before. Coco didn't like things on the table. She had told him that. He walked over and saw they were photo•graphs. One was the picture he had already seen of Big Dog Michelle and Tillman Reeves laughing. The other was a close-up of Coco's neck with the Bruno Mann tattoo on it.

Holding one in each hand, he looked back and forth between them. A tattooed neck and two black people laughing. The images meant little but he knew they were his new beginning. As he walked back to the bedroom to get dressed, it came to him that if he couldn't find Bruno then he would next go looking for Michelle Maslow.

When he got back to his apartment, Vincent Ettrich looked at his possessions and surroundings with the kind of cocked head a dog makes when it hears the sound of a harmonica. As he sat down at his desk, his eyes fell on a thought he had written on a Post-it note and stuck on a lamp: "Some women are meant to be worshipped, others are meant to be fucked. Men's greatest problem is they keep mistaking one for the other."

Some people are defined by their job, or the damage they do, the children they have, the legacies they build, the way they see the world, or the way they trick the world into seeing them as other than they are. Vincent Ettrich would not have minded if someone said he was defined by the number of women he had known and sometimes loved in his life. Now that he was dead, or
had
been dead and was back alive for whatever reason, he looked at that quote and thought nothing is different. I still feel the same about women. I still feel the same about life. If I
was
sick and died but don't remember any of it, then what good does it do me? What have I learned? What I want today is the same thing I wanted yesterday— an interesting job, a few bucks in my pocket, and some women in my life I like to hang around with. So what did it matter that he had no heartbeat anymore and this impossible knowledge about him•self if he could do nothing with either?

He remembered an article he'd read about reincarnation. An expert on the subject was asked, if reincarnation really exists, then why can't we remember anything about our past lives? The expert's answer made Ettrich laugh because it was so appropriate. "I can't even remember what I had for lunch two days ago. How am I supposed to recollect what it was like to live in ancient Egypt?"

Remembering this, Ettrich smiled a little and let his eyes wander around his desk. He saw an old letter from Isabelle in Austria and was reaching for it when he noticed the light on his answering machine blinking. Someone had called while he was out. He leaned to his left and pressed the button.

"Vincent, this is Bruno Mann. We have to talk. You know why. My number is 133—7898. Call as soon as you get this."

Ettrich sat forward so fast that his neck snapped back and it hurt. What stunned him almost more than the fact the person he needed to talk to most had called, the telephone number Bruno gave was the same as his: 133—7898.

For some odd reason, he had developed the habit of tapping in telephone numbers with his thumb. People commented on it, women invariably thought it was cute. This time his hand was shak•ing so much that on the first try he clumsily punched in the wrong number.

"Shit shit shit." For the first time in years he slowly used his index finger to press in his own telephone number. To his dismay the line was busy. "Who the hell is a dead man talking to?" And then he thought of himself and made a face. He redialed four times in the next two minutes but the line remained busy. He knew that if he kept doing it with no luck he'd go nuts. Looking around for something to do, he snatched up Isabelle's letter and read it.

"There is always something terribly urgent I need to tell you about, Vincent. Something always important. A nuance, a gesture, a sound, a belief, a memory, a vision, an anonymous black steel grave marker in the town cemetery, a flock of birds flying overhead outside Hansy's
Gasthaus
window, the man and his retarded son we watched eating lunch that day, the smell of a kiss, the sounds of sex, the sweat in your palms, the tears on my cheek, the coffee smell in the air at AIDA, that white-gray of a winter evening's breath. There is always something terribly urgent I must tell you about. Because you are essential, because you are mine, because you understand, because you have brought my life back to life again. Because of so many other things. Thank God for you.

"I have this one wish. Take whatever time you need, and if it takes you years that doesn't matter. Here it is: write me a letter with your own hand, in your beautiful handwriting, telling me all you want to tell me, all I am for you, all I am, all you are for me, all we are, so that if one day I will not be able to take baths anymore, I can read that letter and it will be beloved water."

The great, the sublime Isabelle. Isabelle Neukor. Three quarters perfection, one quarter broken glass. But he would have walked barefoot back and forth across that glass, he would have
eaten
it if it meant he could have her. They met when Ettrich was in Vienna because his company was hired to do promotion for the Viennale film festival and he spoke fluent German. She was the only woman he had ever known who he honestly believed he could be content with, but she never let that happen. He had tried for years and sometimes she said yes, I'm ready, give me your life and I will give you mine. But then something always scared her off—sometimes a minute later, sometimes at the last minute. At that point she would disappear—always to another country and sometimes into the arms of another man. She would write Ettrich how happy she was there and how she would always love him as a friend, but...

Invariably though a letter like this one would arrive and always always always his heart leapt up like a child waking to Christmas morning. In his beautiful handwriting he once copied down a quote he found and gave
it
to her. "Those who cross the sea change the sky above them, but not their sails."

Now a wicked chill ran through him when he thought of some•thing Coco had said—he was reborn the instant he saw her for the first time. Did that mean Isabelle was not real? Was his memory of her and all the things in his life simply a macabre illusion?

He had no time to think about it because the telephone rang. He snatched it up and hello'd? as fast as his mouth could move.

"Vincent? It's Bruno." "Thank God."

There was a pause on the other end until Bruno said, "Are you sure He exists? Right now I don't know what I'm thinking about God."

"Amen to that, brother."

"You did die, didn't you, Vincent? I
did
go to your funeral. You were sick and then you died, right? All of my memory is totally confused and distorted. When I saw you in the restaurant today I almost wet my pants. I went to your funeral! I went to St. Julian's hospital when you were there and brought you flowers!"

Ettrich picked up a pen and wrote "St. Julian's" on the bottom of Isabelle's letter.

"Yeah, it's true, Bruno, but I don't remember any of it either. Or any of what happened to me. I had to be told. And when I didn't believe it she showed me. She had to prove it to me."

"Exactly! Exactly! That's what happened to me too. So where can we meet? Can we do it now? I'm going out of my mind. Nothing's changed, Vincent. I died and I'm back but nothing's changed! I don't remember anything except what he told me and then showed me in the restaurant."

Ettrich frowned. In his mind he saw Coco talking to Bruno in Acumar. "
He?
Who's he?" "Brandt. The man you were sitting with in the restaurant— Edward Brandt."

"I was with a woman, Bruno. I introduced you two. Her name is Coco Hallis."

Bruno cackled a crazy laugh that stopped as fast as it began. "It was a man, Vincent. I met a man at your table, no woman. You introduced me to Edward Brandt."

On each end of the connection, both men wore almost exactly the same bewildered, haunted expression. They thought the same words too—Oh my God.

Before he left the apartment to meet Bruno, Ettrich made one more call. He didn't want to make it but knew he had to.

He called Kitty and she wasn't happy. She immediately asked what he wanted in a peeved voice and said it was very late, please be quick. In as nice a voice as he could muster, he asked if she had heard anything more from Bruno Mann's wife. In an even more irritated voice she asked why Nancy Mann would call her?

"Well, you know, because of what happened to Bruno." "What happened to him?"

Without being aware of it, his voice took on an edge. "Kitty, you called me this afternoon. You said— "I said nothing. I've been out all day, Vincent. I was busy. Why would I call
you
?" She hung up.

To her and the rest of the world Bruno Mann had never died.

On his way to meeting Bruno, Vincent Ettrich performed his first miracle. He lived on the south side of town, Bruno way in the western suburbs. They agreed to meet at an upscale bar named Hof's that specialized in rare kinds of whiskey. Ettrich liked the place because Isabelle Neukor had introduced him to it. One of her many remarkable surprises. At work one day he received an e-mail from her. Isabelle loved any kind of mail and often wrote him three or four times a day when things were going well between them. Some•times a letter in the post to his office, others waited in his computer like kisses made of words. This time she sent him only the name and address of an unfamiliar bar and told him to be there at one that afternoon for a surprise. He smiled, thinking she'd arranged over the telephone from Vienna for him to be served a nice lunch, her treat. When he arrived, Isabelle was sitting at a table talking to Margaret Hof, the owner of the bar. It astonished but didn't surprise him.

Once when they were in bed, Isabelle asked him to describe her in one word. She was always doing things like that—asking him to condense his world into one word or phrase or picture that showed her how he saw things. He thought a while and then said, "An Italian opera."

She shook her head. "That's three words."

"There's no one word that can contain all of you, Isabelle." "Try."

He thought some more and abruptly the right word came to him. "Sea." "'C'? Like the letter?"

"No, like the ocean." There was a glass of water on the night table. He lifted it. "Most women I've known are like