Death Kit (7 page)

Corneal opacities usually date from birth. But not necessarily. Hester could have gone blind during childhood; her eyes badly scarred from, say, severe conjunctivitis. She might once have seen everything in the usual way: flesh, flowers, the sky. Even looked through a microscope in her eighth-grade science class.

“What kind of microscope?” said the stamp dealer. Was he interested, too?

Diddy's company manufactured several of the standard varieties. Some of the less familiar types, too.

Toolmakers microscopes.

Metallurgical microscopes.

Comparison microscopes.

Projection microscopes.

Ophthalmoscopes.

Retinoscopes.

Otoscopes.

These last three, medical tools, used by eye and ear specialists.

The aunt perked up. “Maybe they use your company's microscopes at the Warren Institute. Your company might make something that the doctors really need, that's going to help my Hester.”

“I'd like to think that,” said Diddy, feeling still more uncomfortable at this tactless turn of the conversation. The girl, being blind, had become a thing; discussed as if she weren't even present in our compartment.

“If I could see through an instrument,” said the girl suddenly, “the one I'd choose would be a telescope. I'd like to see the stars. Especially to see the light coming from a dead star. One that died a million years ago, but goes on as if it didn't know it was dead.”

“Lovey, you're being morbid again!” The aunt, nestling into Hester's unresponsive shoulder. “I want my little girl to continue to be brave.”

“It's not morbid to be more interested in big things than in little things,” said the girl sharply.

And, feeling anew the wave of kinship that flowed between them and the magical synchronicity of their thoughts, it occurred to Diddy: Then perhaps it's not morbid to be more interested in what is dead than what is alive.

He, at least, no longer had a choice. The workman was like one of the dead stars that Hester longed to see. Already extinguished, but still sending forth over long distances a beam of light as lifelike and convincing as that issuing from the most vibrant and contemporary star. Diddy had to remind himself that the workman existed in the past. Not be led astray by appearances. However strong the light which the workman cast on Diddy's mind, the man was really dead. Diddy had killed a black sun, which now burned in his head. Surely the girl could see the black sun, if she tried. Even being blind. Or perhaps because of that. Was she testing him? He must hold fast to the difference between dead stars and living stars, however the evidence of his senses confuses him.

Hold fast as well to the difference between large and small, far and near. Every moment the train bore him farther away. And night was falling, when all light becomes false. An artifice: a brave lie to stave off fear of the dark; a trick. Like all sighted people, Diddy needs to be able to tell the difference. While the girl, forced to live consistently in the dark, is exempt from that perilous task of discrimination. But perhaps she was different from most people. So different that even if she weren't blind or her sight were (now) to be restored, she wouldn't become confused. All light, all that she could see, would be true. Diddy no longer angry. She'd told him the truth as she knew it. And though Hester was mistaken about some of the facts, and though she might never be persuaded she was in error, there was a prodigious truth she did know. And that truth Diddy the Incomplete wanted to learn; to possess it alongside his own truth. No one should venture into the dark alone.

*   *   *

Upon arriving at our common destination, feverish Diddy carried his own light suitcase and the suitcases and parcels belonging to Hester and her aunt off the train. Pushed ahead of some other passengers waiting to engage a redcap, and half bullied the man into taking their things first. Then escorted the two women through the old-fashioned station. With its extravagantly high-ceilinged main waiting room. Walls surfaced in marble. Neo-Roman columns. World War I memorial statue of the frail wounded doughboy caught up, just as he went limp and was about to fall, in the robust arms of the Republic: a large stern woman who gazes resolutely over the head of the dying youth. A railroad station is public space, open to anybody. Though promiscuous meeting and transit may be difficult for Diddy at this time, that lofty ceiling he especially approved of; the more space, the better. But as on every trip upstate to the plant in recent years, Diddy can't help marking the steady deterioration of the surfaces and furniture of this station. On each arrival the floor, walls, columns, bronze statue, information booth, clock, ticket windows, newspaper stand, wooden benches look more indelibly stained and grimier and more thickly littered. Not only mere negligence is at work here, surely. A question of policy or principle. Only a matter of time before the wrecker's ball gets around to undoing this generous space, so that something smaller can be put up in its stead. But isn't there a good deal to be said for keeping a doomed place clean and in decent repair? The claims of dignity, for instance. Especially since nemesis is proving to be somewhat dilatory in paying its anticipated call.

Following some twenty feet behind the redcap taking their luggage on a dolly; Diddy and the aunt on either side of Hester, steering through the crowd. Between the neo-Roman columns flanking the main entrance out to the sidewalk. Diddy tips the man, then stands off the curb trying to estimate their chances of getting two taxis in the next few minutes if they remain where they are. But these services didn't seem enough, and he dreaded letting the girl vanish from his life. Standing on the sidewalk, well back from the curb; patiently allowing—or so it seemed to Diddy—one arm to be held in her aunt's protective, unnecessary, unrelenting embrace. Diddy looking for some signal from the girl, not finding one. And not knowing what to look for.

He was startled, too, by the depressing look of the city. Heavy, gray, uncoordinated. And terribly noisy. A furious bluster of noise, hard to sort out. Not at all like the insistent, demanding, authoritative sounds of the train. Did the girl mind noises when she couldn't interpret them?

Longish wait. When a taxi pulled up, Diddy, who hadn't known that's what he intended to do, got in with the two women and accompanied them to the Warren Institute. “But it's out of your way, Mr. Harron. We don't want to put you to any trouble.” Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. All the street lights were on, but the buildings looked like two-dimensional drawings of themselves. The hospital no different. “Hold the flag, driver. I'll be right with you. Now, Mrs. Nayburn, Hester, please tell me.…” After being assured that the girl's room was waiting for her and that the aunt had a reservation at a boarding house three blocks away, Diddy carried their suitcases into the hospital as far as the admissions desk. Shy good nights. Then went back downtown to the Rushland, where out-of-town executives and salesmen always stayed at the company's expense when visiting the home office. Luckily, no one else from New York coming up for the conference was in the hotel lobby when he registered.

Nearly ten-thirty when Diddy was shown to his room. Unpacked, showered, then called down to the desk to inquire about the first edition of the local morning paper. It came out around 2 a.m. He asked to be phoned at that hour. (Now) eleven o'clock: Diddy turned on the television and found the program he wanted. From behind a desk a bland balding man offered an allotment of communiqués from the front—large enemy losses exactly counted, our casualties light—and politicians' tautologies; items about someone shooting his mother-in-law, a penitentiary riot, the impending divorce of a celebrated Hollywood couple; a condescending account of how the heavyweight champion smashed a young pretender in two rounds in Mexico City; and something about the weather: fair and colder, winds from the northeast. But no fatality on the railroad that afternoon. Perhaps such a death wasn't important or picturesque enough to rate inclusion in the “News.” Diddy turned off the set, and decided to try turning himself off as well. Although the hour is early, too agitated to entrust himself to the open spaces of the city streets, with their possibilities of haphazard, impersonal encounters. But something seems almost as threatening, in a coy way, about the anonymous surfaces and the carefully neutralized smell of this room. He will have to go further into himself, away from all coherent rational spaces. Perhaps he can sleep. Of the twin beds in the room, Diddy chose the one near the window, though he didn't open the window or switch on the air-conditioner.

But he can't sleep; he can barely manage to keep his eyes closed for more than a few moments. A wide-angle photograph of the workman fallen across the track projecting itself on the inside of his eyelids, though this is (now) a stop-action shot repeatedly interpolated into a sequence of moving images, filmed with a shaky hand-held camera, that Diddy just watched on the “News”: a dead GI, a large body on a stretcher covered from head to foot with a coarse blanket or tarpaulin, being loaded into the maw of a waiting helicopter which has alighted, blades flashing, motor roaring, body shuddering, in some alien rice field. Terrible to die, terrible to have life revoked before one is willing to give it up. And Diddy has done that to someone. Panicked, played the terrible landlord, foreclosed a life. Over and over, this time without picturing, he reimagines the encounter with the workman. Yet, it might be argued that what Diddy has done was excusable, even legitimate. The workman had, for no reason, provoked him. Was inexplicably menacing; was armed. Still, Diddy wasn't convinced that he'd acted simply in self-defense. Were Diddy his own judge, at a real trial, he would never have accepted that plea. The workman was uncouth, insolent. Yes. But insolence couldn't be assumed to augur more, more than just further insolence. And hadn't the man shrugged off his own behavior and, as if to prove the harmlessness of his intentions, turned his back to Diddy? To be sure, some suspicious movements had then followed. But maybe the man was just preparing to toss the ax in with his other tools, gather them all together, and go off. Where? To board the train? Unless he was too anarchic, too much of a loner, to have been one of the train's crew, submitting to group discipline. In that case, his destination was probably wherever the solitary laborer on duty was lodged, like a sentry, ready for any emergency or breakdown—perhaps in some chamber branching off the main space of the tunnel.… At this moment, Diddy inclined to give to the workman the benefit of the doubt. The only certainty: that Diddy the Good will never be able to establish, to his own satisfaction, what the man had actually intended. Nor could he know then, in the tunnel. Either astutely observing or blindly assuming that a sneak attack was imminent, Diddy struck first. His opponent either a murderous bully who had dropped his guard or a defenseless human being. But either way, a cowardly assault; since the workman, formidable as he was, never had a chance.

Diddy has left on the small night-table lamp. He doesn't want the dark. He's been in the dark enough today to last a lifetime. No darkness! He must remain alert and perceptive, to fend off the bloody ghosts, to repel the creatures who thrive on the absence of light. Even if it means banishing all creatures. Even if it means being alone. Diddy is alone. Which is almost bearable. He's been much alone the last three years, since Joan walked out. But “alone” seems undignified, pitiable, weak. Again, as he has so often, he tries to convert loneliness into something noble, when freely elected: solitude. Solitude is strong. Yet there is a great difference between solitude in a space with an immense horizon and solitude in a small space. Diddy cornered. Cooped up in a small antiseptic space with pastel walls and maple furniture; and on the wall, daintily framed, “O beauteous land, O gracious land.” Solitary, with no lines out to the world. He thrashes about in the narrow bed, sweating, each purposeless turning of his naked body further loosening the sheets and creasing them. Thinks of phoning his brother. But Paul's out on tour; and Diddy left behind in his apartment Paul's letter containing the schedule of concerts. Paul's agent in New York, from whom he could find out where the great virtuoso is tonight, probably wouldn't be home at this hour. And Paul, wherever he is out there in the beauteous gracious land, has the fans and musicians and celebrity-collectors who crowd backstage to look over for possible pleasures, sexual or professional, as well as the after-concert parties to reconnoiter. Is unlikely to return to his hotel until long after midnight. Anyway, having reached Paul, what would Diddy say? Such a call would be an evasion of manhood's responsibilities, a childish bid for sympathy from someone close who had never been genuinely sympathetic or close. If there is a telephone call to be made, Diddy thinks, shouldn't he just get it over with? Diddy considers calling the police.

Still, there's no hurry. If Diddy even suspects a little that the murder of the trackman was just a nightmare or, as Hester Nayburn suggested, a daydream, then he ought to make sure. He can wait at least until he checks the papers. Nothing served by making a fool of himself. Something he's done a good deal this past month. If he contacted the police at this late hour, they'd rush over in a squad car to arrest him, stick him for the rest of the night in a cold cell, an even smaller space than this. And if it turned out in the morning that the murder Diddy claimed as his was a phantom-murder, it would not be easy just to walk out of the jail. The police would undoubtedly insist that Diddy undergo psychiatric tests. He'd be taken from jail and deposited at the local Bellevue, missing the ten o'clock opening of the conference tomorrow morning, and probably the whole day's session. His absence would be remarked, inquiries made, and when the company discovered where he was being detained and for what reason, he'd be fired. Needless to say, no one at Watkins & Company knew why Diddy took a week's leave last month. He'd told Duva an old virus infection had flared up, requiring hospitalization.