Without Mercy (12 page)

I WAS FINALLY NEARING THE BOTTOM OF MY IN-BOX,
having spent all afternoon sorting, signing, rerouting, delegating, and shredding, interrupting my labors periodically to grouse through the doorway at Peggy, to whom I jokingly—or half jokingly—assigned the blame for all the drudge work.

Miranda appeared in the doorway of my administrative office. “
You
look miserable,” she said.

“Nonsense,” I snarled. “I'm having the time of my life.”

“Here,” she said, sliding a large red-and-black envelope across the desktop. “Maybe this'll cheer you up.”

“What is it? A new, condensed version of your dissertation? Not your resignation, I hope?”

“Neither,” she laughed. “It's a Netflix DVD.
The Revenant
.”

“You own this?”

She gave me a puzzled look. “What century do you live in? No, I don't own it. It's Netflix.” She saw the blank look on my face. “Oh, good grief. Netflix. It's like . . . son of Blockbuster and FedEx. By way of Match.com.”

“Huh?”

She shook her head. “Never mind. Forget all that. Let me start over. Netflix is an online movie service. You pay a monthly fee, you order movies off the website, and they show up in your mailbox the next day.”

“How can they do it so fast?”

“The wonders of technology. You do know what a DVD is, right?” I scowled. “And you have the means to
play
a DVD?”

“Depends on the format,” I said. “Is it a clay tablet, or carved in stone?”

“Point taken,” she said, turning and waving good-bye on her way out. “Enjoy.”

I opened the envelope and slid out the silvery disk. Unlike the DVDs I had at home—
Shakespeare in Love
and
The Princess Bride
and a handful of others Kathleen had bought years before for herself or for “us” (she claimed) or for the grandkids—this was not encased in hard plastic. Instead, it was simply tucked into a slippery Tyvek sleeve. Was that enough to protect it from the abuses of the U.S. Postal Service? It didn't appear broken or scratched, so perhaps so. Was the disk itself just like the highly packaged ones in my living room, or was this some new format that my aging DVD player wouldn't be able to handle? I had no idea.

I heard a rustle in the outer office. “Peggy? Are you still here?”

“Just leaving,” she said, appearing in the doorway, one arm through the sleeve of her jacket.

“Do you know about Netflix?”

“I do,” she said. “And the automobile, and the aeroplane, and Mr. Bell's telephone.”

“You're as bad as Miranda,” I grumbled.

“Coming from you, I'll take that as a compliment,” she beamed.

“Do you belong, or subscribe, or whatever?”

“Doesn't everybody?” She raised her eyebrows. “I mean, everybody under ninety-five?”

“Ha ha. So this is just a regular old DVD, right? I can play it in the antique DVD player I have at home?”

“Sure. Or you can play it in your computer, if you'd rather.”

“My home computer?”

“Your home computer. Your work computer.
Any
computer with a DVD drive.”

I looked at the monitor sitting on my desk. “I can watch movies on
this
?”

“I wouldn't make a habit of it—you're always behind on your paperwork as it is—but yes, of course,” she said. “Just pop it in the drive, and the DVD player should boot up automatically.”

“Are you sure?” Instead of answering, she simply gestured at the machine, a try-it-and-see look in her eyes.

Bending beneath the desk, I touched a button on the computer's housing, and a thin tray slid open. Placing the disk in the tray's circular recess, I nudged the drawer gently and it slid shut. A moment later, I heard the disk spooling up and saw the computer monitor go black, then bright green, with white words:

THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR APPROPRIATE AUDIENCES BY THE MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.

“Amazing,” I said.

“What's the movie?”

“
The Revenant
. Fun with bears and Indians, apparently.”

“So I hear,” she said. “Shall I go put some popcorn in the microwave?”

I laughed. “Yeah, sure,” I said, leaning down to eject the disk.

“Don't start without me,” she said. “I'll be back in three minutes.”

I looked up, surprised, my finger poised above the eject button. “Sorry, what?”

“I said don't start without me. The popcorn takes three minutes. I'll grab some Cokes, too.”

“Oh.” This was a wrinkle. I hadn't planned to watch the movie here; I'd planned to watch it at home, in my comfortable recliner. In my comfortable, empty house. Alone.
Oh, what the hell
, I thought. “Okay,” I said. “I'll pause it when the FBI copyright warning comes up. Wouldn't want you to miss that.”

“I've seen some movies where that was the most exciting scene,” she deadpanned as she headed toward the hallway to fetch the refreshments.

“LOOKS LIKE A RAIN FOREST,” PEGGY REMARKED AS
the film's opening scene began, the camera tracking hunters sloshing through swampy woodlands, gloomy beneath towering conifers. “I thought you said the Arikara lived in the Great Plains.”

“They did,” I said. “At least, the ones I dug up did. South Dakota and North Dakota. This looks more like Montana. Or Oregon.”

Soon, the shot widened to show us that the sloshing hunters were white men, one of them a bearded, filthy, but recognizable Leonardo DiCaprio. “Maybe the hunters are lost,” Peggy offered. “Or maybe they track their prey all the way to the Plains.”

“Shh,” I said.

A few minutes later, the Arikara made their entrance, which they announced by shooting an arrow through the back of a running white man—a running white man who was, for some reason, buck naked. Peggy started and gasped when the arrow plowed into him and emerged halfway from his chest, just before he fell. An instant later, an Indian war party on horseback, whooping and unleashing a hail of bullets and arrows, galloped down a slope and surrounded the band of white trappers, unleashing swift, brutal death. “I thought you said the Arikara were farmers,” Peggy said. “And sedentary.”

“They were,” I said. “At least, the ones I dug up.”

“I thought you said they didn't have horses or guns.”

“Artistic license,” I said. “Now shh.”

Miraculously, DiCaprio—or, rather, ace wilderness scout Hugh Glass, whom DiCaprio was portraying—managed to survive the slaughter, along with a dozen other men, including Glass's half-Pawnee son. Racing to their boat, hauling heavy bundles of animal pelts, they pushed off and beat a hasty retreat downriver, the Indians continuing to lob arrows at the boat until it was out of range.

But we were only ten minutes into a three-hour movie, so clearly the trappers weren't out of the woods yet. Knowing the Indians would surely race downstream to ambush them, Glass persuaded them to ditch the boat and head overland instead, angling toward the nearest fort. The battered group made camp, and Glass went hunting alone, seeking food for the group. That's when his troubles began, for Glass had the misfortune to come between a mother grizzly and her two cubs. Distracted by the cubs, Glass didn't see the mother charging until it was too late to get off a shot.

When the immense bear hit Glass, Peggy shrieked, and
when it ripped him open, she grabbed my hand, squeezing so hard it hurt. After a moment, her grip eased, but she didn't let go, and I found myself only half watching the movie. Had she forgotten that she was holding my hand? Should I extricate my palm from her grip?
Probably
, I told myself.
But not yet
. It had been years since I'd held hands with anyone, but I hadn't even realized how much I'd missed it, that simple human touch. On any given day, it wasn't uncommon for me to shake hands with ten or twenty or even a hundred people, but a handshake was different—profoundly different—from holding hands.

I sat like that, silent and unmoving, though moved, for the next two hours, Peggy's grip occasionally tightening again, when yet another brutal calamity occurred on-screen. And when the end came, she gave my hand a final, gentler squeeze, as if to say “thank you” or perhaps “good night”—it was now after eight o'clock—then wiped tears from her eyes, stood up, and hurried out of the office, leaving me sitting in half darkness and utter confusion.

She also left me surrounded by ghosts. The ghost of Kathleen, my wife of thirty years, who had died a swift, unexpected death from cancer a decade before. The ghost of Jess Carter, a medical examiner from Chattanooga who had coaxed me from my cave of grief and shown me that I could love again—had shown me that I
wanted
to love again—but had been murdered by a jealous colleague. The ghost of Isabella Arakawa Morgan, a beautiful, brilliant, but deranged Japanese American librarian I'd worked with—and slept with, once—before discovering that she had murdered a scientist she blamed for the atomic blast that had killed her parents decades earlier, at the end of World War II. The only two women in my life now, apart from my son's wife, were my graduate
assistant and my secretary: one of them thirty years my junior, and about to leave; the other a longtime subordinate who—despite her fearful clutching of my hand—surely knew my failings far too well to harbor romantic feelings for me.

“Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery,” a famous French doctor wrote in his memoir. I myself carried multiple cemeteries within myself, though only one of them was small: the cemetery where the women I'd loved and lost were buried. Others—the crime victims whose bodies and bones I'd studied; the donated corpses whose decay my students and I had scrutinized and charted—numbered in the many hundreds by now.

But most numerous in my cemeteries were the Arikara Indians, some six thousand of them, carefully shelved and kept one floor beneath me, in the vast, cavernous recess beneath the stadium's south end zone. And as I locked the building—full of the dead, but emptied of the living—and headed home, it was the ghosts of the Arikara I seemed to hear whispering as I wound my way downriver alongside the dark, spooling currents of the Tennessee.

They whispered of loss: the loss of their lands, their civilization, their women and children and homes. They whispered of slaughtered bison and ferocious bears and wounded hunters. Above all they whispered of life and love, and the tenuous, fragile, crucial entwining of one with the other.

I HAD A DREAM, AND IN MY DREAM, I WAS STANDING
on a grassy shore, water lapping at my work boots. It was night, and the moon was full and bright, reflecting off the rippling water. At my feet was a grave—circular, to minimize the amount of digging needed in the hard prairie soil—and within the grave, gleaming faintly in the moonlight, were bones, half covered by a buffalo robe. The skeleton was flexed into a fetal position to fit within the grave; atop and alongside and among the bones was a profusion of grave goods: heaps of beads and bangles and carved birds and bears.

Reaching down into the grave, I lifted out the skull. It was a woman's skull, an adult, and as I held it up in the moonlight, I recognized it as the skull of Kathleen, my own wife, whom I myself had buried in this spot years before. “I'm so sorry to disturb you,” I said, “but I have to move you. They've dammed the river, and the water's rising. I'll go get a box and come right back to get you.”

I laid the skull gently on the grass and headed to the tent
camp my students and I had pitched on the flattened, grassy shelf above the water. Except for the gentle lapping of water on the shore and the soft sigh of wind through the grass, the camp was silent, the white canvas tents shining. Even the inside of my tent was faintly illuminated by the moonlight filtering through the canvas.

I knew that I had an empty bone box in the tent, but for some reason I couldn't find it. I rummaged through everything once, twice, three times, confused and growing agitated. Where was Kathleen's box? What if I'd lost it? Finally, tucked beneath my army cot, I found it. Nestling it beneath one arm, I hurried back to the shore.

But the grave was gone: vanished beneath the rising waters. “Kathleen,” I called, stricken, “where are you?” The only answer was the sound of small waves lapping at my feet. Frantic now, I set the box down on the embankment and dropped to my knees, groping the submerged ground, seeking the curved edge of the circular pit. Nothing.

The water continued to rise. Soon it was up to my thighs, and then to my waist. I kept searching, now taking a deep breath and submerging myself, swimming blindly in the murky water, feeling for the grave, the buffalo robe, the bones, anything. At last my fingers closed around the straight, smooth shaft of a long bone, a bone so stout it could only have been a femur. Gripping tightly, I fought to free it. By now the water was deep, completely over my head, and I braced my feet on the muddy bottom to pull. The bone came free, and with the last bit of air in my lungs, I kicked to the surface and swam, exhausted, to the shore with the bone.

But it was not a bone. It was only a bare, brittle branch, and when I saw it, mocking in the moonlight, I knew Kathleen
was lost to me forever. Dragging myself from the water, I lay in the grass and wept.

At some point in my dream I must have fallen asleep, for I felt myself awaken. It was still night; the moon still up, though low in the western sky, casting a broad, shimmering track across the rippling water: a river of moonlight. Suddenly the moon river was shattered into sparkling shards, and I saw something—someone—swimming through it, swimming down the dancing light, swimming directly toward me. Then, some distance short of the shore, the swimmer stopped and stood. It—she, an Arikara woman—was waist-deep in the water, her black hair slick and shining, water sheeting off her shoulders and dropping, like shining quicksilver, from the undercurve of her breasts and the dark tips of her nipples.

She looked at me frankly, with no trace of embarrassment or fear, and allowed me to look at her, her face mysterious and yet somehow familiar. Slowly she reached behind her neck, gathered her hair to one side, and began to twist, wringing water from it. Then, releasing the long rope of hair, she began to swing her head from side to side, back and forth, causing her hair to pendulum, faster and faster, until soon she was whipping it around and around in a great circle, an immense dark halo, surrounded by a galaxy of glowing droplets radiating outward, as if she were some dark cosmic goddess creating the very universe, spinning out stars and planets.

When she had finished, she looked at me again, then stretched a hand toward me, palm upward. Hesitant at first, I rose, then walked to the water's edge, where I stopped and stood. She waited, her hand still out, and at last I took a step,
then another and another, into the water to join her. Just before I reached her, the bottom dropped from beneath me, and I sank beneath the surface. I reached out for her hand, but could not find it.

Flailing and struggling, swallowing water, I fought my way to the empty surface.

I awoke, in a fit of coughing, in my empty bed in my empty house in my sleeping Knoxville neighborhood.