Death Kit (6 page)

The girl gasps, a kind of interruption, but Diddy pretends not to notice. The truth was falling like bricks.

“If I didn't actually kill him, he's dead anyway, and I'm responsible. I hit him with a crowbar and he fell in front of the train, so that when the train started up again—”

“But,” the girl, interrupting, “you never left the train.” She loosens herself from his embrace. “I was trying to tell you that before. You were never out of the compartment, believe me. I have excellent hearing.” Is the counsel of the senses to be trusted? No.

“Listen, you must understand.…” Diddy doesn't explain anything (now), of course. He just repeats himself. She shakes her head. Interrupts him again and again.

How far apart they are (now), even in the tiny space of the lavatory. The gluey touch is forgotten, the damp hair, and the sweet rubbing and melting. Diddy has let that go, as a common thing, and stands behind his tray of words.

“We should go back,” the girl says gently. “My aunt might worry.”

Diddy sighs. Of course. Unlocks the door. Hand in hand, they turn right, then right again into the corridor. A few steps. Diddy waits while Hester smooths down her hair once more. And without telling her, scans her clothing for any telltale disarray or stains; his clothing, also. Pressing his face against the girl's cheek once more, feeling the hard frame of her glasses between them. Then Diddy slides open the compartment door. Her aunt is still asleep, snoring slightly, mouth askew; the priest and the stamp dealer still reading.

Seated in the compartment, Diddy gazes at Hester, who seems different (now) than she did either in the corridor or in the lavatory. She's leaning her head against the back of the seat; he can't tell if her eyes are shut.

Diddy shuts his own eyes. Why is the girl so obstinate? She must remember! Suppose she doesn't? Does Diddy dare ask the priest or the stamp dealer if he had left the compartment before? Could the girl be right? Perhaps he conjured up the coarse workman; dreamed the broken male body hugging the track. Maybe he's transposing back into the vast, humid, uterine, dusky world of the tunnel the adventure that's just occurred in the cramped space of the washroom. An adventure hardly less expected than what he thinks took place earlier in the tunnel. Is Diddy capable of such a bizarre error? Confusing the transaction of desire with the transaction of violence, trust with fear. Mixing up different domains of blindness and enclosure.

Diddy is beginning, just beginning, to doubt his memory. But that always happens, doesn't it? All past events, both real and imaginary, are consigned to the trusteeship of the imagination. Whether the killing of the workman was fantasy or fact, Diddy has no access to it (now) except through his imagination. The past must be reimagined; memories aren't like furniture, something solid that you can own.

How to remember. The task of remembering supersedes even the task of getting himself forgiven. Or does it? Diddy worries that he's taking the easy way out, letting himself off the hook.

Nothing he can do for the moment, except try to remain calm. When he reaches his destination, he can investigate. Oh, there will probably be no need for that. If indeed a workman has been killed in the tunnel, the news will be carried on the radio, on television, and in the papers. Most of the time Diddy does believe that he's killed someone. But the size has changed. The ruthless velocity of the train is carrying Diddy away, somewhere farther. Elongating perspective, establishing the past as past in an all too purely material way of altered distance and scale. As the train charges forward, the formidable workman has become diminutive, although all the more precious for his small size. Diddy must strain to see him still. It's as if Diddy needs glasses (now). The workman has become a little figure in a little tunnel, a toy object, almost a hobby of Diddy's wandering will. Like a rare postage stamp, much sought after by collectors, picturing the miniature flag of a defunct country since absorbed into a newly created larger nation, or the small pompous profile of a king who had abdicated or been dethroned long ago.

Diddy sitting in the compartment, pondering the curious size of things. A grayish twilight is coming down. Looking inadvertently out of the window, Diddy catches the moment when a light goes on in a distant farmhouse. A vigil light, perhaps. Saying to the weary husband and father still astride his tractor, finishing a day of strenuous labor: Come home for your hot supper, to your children who will scramble into your lap, to your wife's ample bed. Though himself without the safety of home, Diddy responds to the signal. Longs to get out (now), into this plenitude; off the train while space is still open and empty. For soon the ground will be filling up, the houses coming closer, crowding to the edge of the tracks, multiplying and eventually congealing into large buildings. Soon the train will bisect a town. Then, after a shorter interval, plunge through another town. And finally to the city where we all have to haul down our luggage from the racks overhead, and get off.

Then, marooned in the city to come, Diddy will have to face what he's done. Or not done. All of which has been thrown into question. He blames this on the girl, but it's not her fault, really. The confusion, and the need to complicate matters, must lie in him. For the coarse menace of detection and punishment, Diddy has substituted the subtler menace of uncertainty. He has given his anxiety the form of an enigma.

*   *   *

The untidy aunt has awakened, and gone back to sleep again. Diddy and Hester in the glass-roofed club car (now), the last car in the train. Diddy sits with his back to the rear door of the car. Doesn't want to watch the tracks narrowing so hastily behind the train, or be distracted by the two couples at another table playing bridge. Hester is having a daiquiri, Diddy a rye and water.

“I have to ask you about what happened back there … between us.” Diddy is uneasy, embarrassed. “What do you feel? Now.”

“I'm fine,” she says tonelessly.

“You're not sorry about it?”

“Why should I be? I enjoy making love.” Something bitter in her voice that pains Diddy. She could be angry at his story about the workman, which she apparently finds preposterous, and at the fact that he had first lied to her. Or she could be angry at his present line of questioning, find it presumptuous or in bad taste. Diddy chooses to think it is the latter, and becomes offended himself.

“Do you often make love with strangers?” Diddy the Jealous.

“Do you?”

Diddy sighed. “That was a stupid thing to say. Forgive me.”

“There's no point in not doing what you want, is there?” said Hester. “I mean, if nobody's stopping you.”

Diddy sighed again, and took the girl's hand. How complicated everyone is! “Tell me something about yourself, besides that you're having an operation.”

“There isn't much to tell. When you're blind, it's all inside.”

“Have you always been blind?”

Hester didn't answer that question, but went on haltingly with the one before. “How can I describe my life to you? People wait on me, they have to. And I think a lot, listen to music. I'm fond of flowers. I'm—”

“Do you cry sometimes?”

“You asked me that before.”

“I know. And you didn't give me the answer, remember?… Please answer. Maybe I want to know because I cry a lot myself, and I'm not ashamed of it.”

“The answer is yes. Often.”

“Why?”

“Probably not for the same reason you do.”

“How do you know? Anyway, how many reasons are there?”

“Well, I don't think it's because I'm unhappy. If that's what you're imagining. Maybe I cry because I'm bored.”

“I'll bet anything that's not true,” said Diddy. “Why do you say that? Is the truth too private? Am I prying?”

“No, I would like to tell you. But all I can think of is that I cry because there are tears.”

Diddy didn't like that answer. He wanted her to be unhappy, to be like him. “Are you very lonely?”

“Not exactly. But I don't have enough things to touch.”

“Things? You mean people?”

“Yes. People, too.”

“Do you love anyone?” Diddy the Possessive.

“I don't think so. At least, not the way I think you mean. When you're blind, people are changing all the time. The same person is never the same person. He's new every time he speaks or moves or touches me.”

“Do you love your aunt?”

“Oh, no. Not love. But I like things she does. Her constant talking is awful, but I like her touching me. And reading to me. She's a coordinator of children's services in the public library.”

Diddy, relieved, felt bold enough to approach what he really wanted to know. “Do you love me? I mean now.” Diddy, an old adept at unrequited love.

“I did. Back there.” Hester paused. “I don't know about now. You're not as real to me as you were.”

Nettled. Well, what did Diddy expect? “At least you're honest.”

“I try to be. Don't you?”

“Yes, I do! But it hardly matters, does it? Back there, I told you what happened in the tunnel. I told you the truth. But you don't believe me.”

“How can I? I have to believe what I heard. I didn't hear you say you were going outside. And I didn't hear you leave the compartment.”

The girl is adamant. And Diddy doesn't want to quarrel. He wants to be united with her, to be clear as she is clear. And to be blind, too. Still, he needs to talk; and senses that he can address her sympathy if not her credulity. She must be drawn to him, feel for him, or she wouldn't have made love, wouldn't consent to be with him (now).

“I want to tell you the whole story anyway,” he says. “Even though you think I'm making it all up.”

“I didn't say that. Tell me.” She tightens her hand on his. “You're awfully thin. Don't you like to eat?”

Diddy fights to keep from getting wet-eyed at her gift of sympathy. Think of the workman! He begins from the beginning. The walk through the tunnel, the curious obstacle and the solitary workman, outsized and brutish, like an armed angel. Then the monstrous unnecessary battle, and the unhinged body falling across the track. Propping the body against the train.…

“You were daydreaming,” said the girl firmly. “That's why the man seemed so big.”

“Daydreaming in a tunnel?”

“Why not?”

“But I know it happened! I was there.”

“Then ask the others.”

“I don't want to,” Diddy said. “
You're
my witness.”

The girl was silent. Diddy longed to rip her glasses off, to slap her face. As if that way he could make her see.

“You're always sighing,” said the girl. “Do you know that?”

“Sure. That's because I'm angry. But I don't know what to do with my anger.”

“Angry at me?” said Hester.

“Yes. Very angry.”

“Why?”

“For being stubborn,” said Diddy.

“You mean, for being blind.”

“No, I don't mean that.” Diddy sat with half-shut eyelids, unable to look at the girl. Feels imprisoned with her. The adventure is over. Time was dragging. Perhaps the trip will last forever, the train go on speeding through endless twilight. The train has acquired the physical and moral energy of a human body; it judged Diddy. And there was to be no absolution from the girl. So be it.

There was nothing but to return to the compartment, and stare out of the window at the metaphor of nature. In the landscape's farthest recesses, in the very experience of seeing in perspective, to find a model for the depths of what had happened.

*   *   *

The compartment again. Hester's aunt, thoroughly awake, obviously entranced to discover that her niece has been spending so much of the train journey in the company of the personable young man sitting across from them.

Introductions are made. Mrs. Nayburn. My niece, Miss Hester Nayburn. But, of course, by now you two young people must be long past the introduction stage.

Diddy, not remembering that Hester still knew neither his first name nor his last, addressed her aunt. “Dalton Harron.”

“Well, isn't this nice.… What do you do, Mr. Harron? If it's not too forward of me to ask.”

Diddy sent a despairing glance to Hester, who was leaning back in her seat. “I work for a company that manufactures microscopes.”

“One of the big companies?” asked the aunt.

“How interesting,” said the priest, looking up from his breviary. “What a privilege to gaze so closely upon the wonders of nature.”

“Oh,” said Diddy hastily, “I don't do any of the looking through the microscopes.” Wanted to bury this insinuation, awkward in the presence of the girl, that he lived through his eyes. “They're made at the plant upstate and shipped from there. I'm in the New York office. I design brochures for mailing campaigns and work on the advertising placed in scientific and trade journals.”

An Elementary Lesson in the Naming and Use of the Microscope:

Place your microscope on a firm support facing the window.

The lens through which you look is called the eyepiece; the lens at the other end is the objective.

The support on which the slide rests is the stage.

Below the stage is the diaphragm which controls the amount of light that the mirror throws through the circular hole in the center of the stage.

The mirror is used for gathering light to illuminate transparent objects on the stage.

When a solid object, such as the head of a fly, is examined, the light must come from above and from the front of the stage, since the light from the mirror cannot penetrate solids.

“Have you had your job long?” asked the aunt.

“Yes,” said Diddy.

The aunt subsided, perhaps unable for the moment to think of another question. Diddy looked, questioningly, at the girl. The optical microscope was an ancient and noble instrument, essentially unchanged over the centuries. But useless without eyes, a far nobler instrument and infinitely more ancient. Was the girl born blind? One elementary piece of information her aunt hadn't volunteered. Hester hadn't answered him either, when he asked if she'd always been like this. Diddy wants to know. Yet hardly something he could ask (now).