Heathern (11 page)

Lester sat down next to me, keeping distance enough that
while I could take comfort from his nearness I wasn't
pressed into some unwarranted embrace. As I tried to calm
myself I took deep breaths, drawing as much air into my
lungs as I could; feeling, as Jake surely had, that I had killed
without reason. "You and Avi must have been very close,"
he said.

"It's funny," I said, "we broke it off just as we were
getting closest. That's how it always seems to work when
you get to know someone too well, I think. Peel off one too
many layers of skin and then you can't bear the touch any
longer." I stood, straightening my skirt, and walked across
the room to my closet where, ducking behind the door, I
could peer into the mirror there to see what a shambles I
had made of my face. With tissue and cream I removed my
makeup, kicking off my shoes as I stood there, out of
Lester's sight. "So where do you live?"

"Around," he said. "It's good to keep moving."

"You're originally from Tennessee?"

"Kentucky," he corrected. "Everybody up here always
confuses them. I grew up near Lexington. My mother's
folks came from over the mountain."

"What's it like down there?" Some of Thatcher's friends
owned horse farms in the state, and at every business
function were prone to weave shimmering tales of the
plantation life. I'd always suspected they'd poured us
watered bourbon. "It always looks so pretty in the pictures."

"I haven't been there in years," he said. "I don't know
what's left. It's probably like everywhere else by now."

"When I moved out," I said, unbuttoning my blouse, "I
didn't go home again for months. I understand how it is."
When he said nothing in reply I wondered if I possibly
could understand. "Why do they call it the Bluegrass?"

"Don't know. It's the same grass as in Central Park, I
think. Just as brown."

I shut the closet door, coming into his sight once more
wearing only my slip and undergarments. Could a messiah
desire, I wondered; I didn't see why not. He didn't look
away as he saw me, but neither did he seem pleased; his
cheeks flushed red, as if he'd received a sudden transfusion.
"Are your parents still down there?"

"Yes," he said. "They built a Toyota plant across the road
from where our house was, I heard. It must be closed if it
hasn't gone out of business, I suppose. Probably Dryco will
reopen it one day-"

"Probably," I said, walking toward him.

"Do you want me to leave the room while you change
clothes?"

"No." So often during my life I knew a suspicion, that for
periods of time not all of my actions were my own; that a
loved one's dybbuk rose from the void to settle for awhile in
my body, and know the life inside my head. Reaching down, I began unbuttoning his shirt, staring at my hands,
seeing another's. He remained so still that I might have
been undressing a mannequin.

"You're very pretty, Joanna," he said.

"You don't think I'm fat?" Thatcher once told me he
could set a teatray on my ass and I'd never notice until I sat
down, and he intended it as a compliment. "I don't take
very good care of myself."

"It wouldn't matter-" he said. He showed a certain
reluctance as I pulled his shirt from his body, but made no
move to stop me. In clothes he seemed slim; now I saw how
wiry he was, how tightly his muscles were drawn across his
bones. Then, seeing his right side, I backed quickly away,
feeling as he must have felt in the hall, when he asked about
my parents. From his waist to his armpit his skin appeared
as strip-mined as any Kentucky mountainside, pitted where
it should have been smooth, smooth where it should have
been rippled. The original design was forever lost.

"Who shot you?" I asked; Avi had similar scars. For the
first time since we'd met he averted his own eyes.

"It was deer season," he said, laughing. "Hunter mistook
me for a cow." So many men lie as if to their mothers,
stammering out denials with such bravado and so blatantly
that one could only imagine that they dreamed of being
caught.

"Lester-"

"It was a while back," he said. "Didn't hit anything
important. The newspapers called me the miracle child."

"What happened?"

He shook his head; for the moment I let the subject drop.
"You're lucky you lived," I said; he seemed uncertain how
he might respond, and so said nothing. He wore the
semblance of a smile on his lips, as if, having heard an old
family joke for the umpteenth time, he had done his duty
by responding as if he'd heard it all anew. I sat in my
dresser's chair, facing him.

"We can't, Joanna," he said. "I wouldn't feel right."

It should have been understandable, and was, and I was
sorry all the same. He shrugged, and folded up his shirt.
"It's all right ..." I said.

"Their means are difficult, whatever Their ends," he said.
How long, I wondered, had he told himself there was a
purpose before he finally believed it? Against his better
judgment had he wound up hoping, after all, instead of
knowing? As I looked at him I watched him shiver, as if the
room was as cold as Thatcher's. Maybe somebody walked
over his grave.

"Do you ever think about Kentucky?" I asked.

"I'm not much for nostalgia." We sat there a few minutes
more, wordless and slumped, at last eroding beneath our
rain of events, this heaven-sent plague.

"Will you stay here tonight anyway?" I asked. "To talk?"

"I'll stay longer," he said. "You have questions?"

"They must have given you some answers," I said.

"Not the sort of answers anyone wants to hear. What
questions do you mean?"

"Is there an afterlife?" I asked.

"What's the matter with the one you have?"

"Say there is," I said. "Say there was a more perfect world
beyond ours. Why would They keep this one, in that case?"

"Why do you think?" he asked in return. I lay down;
Lester remained seated.

"Practice," I said. "They couldn't bear to part with the
original. They kept it as an object lesson."

He nodded, and looked away from me, pondering his
own questions. "I can't help but disappoint him," he said.
"When that happens, what'll he do to me?"

"Depends on how disappointed he is," I said. "He's such
a bastard. He'll hound me until I leave and hound you until
you start, and it won't matter what happens in the process."

"He'd be right in that," said Lester. "Perhaps it'll lessen the damage to go ahead and get things underway with him,
then-"

I shook my head. "Disappear before he has a chance to
get you. It's not worth getting involved. You don't know
what you'll do until he makes you do it, and then it's too
late. Don't give him the chance."

"It's a chance that must be followed through on," he said.
"There's a purpose for what has to be done. I can't go
anywhere, Joanna. I have to do as I'm told. I doubt I'll need
to be at the company very long."

"Then I won't leave until you do."

"I know," he said. "Such a strange organization. The
immediate circle he seems to rule over as if it were a
family."

"He does," I said. "He and Susie take turns doing the
beating while the other looks on. They're no more dysfunctional than most, they're simply more adept at it."

"Families have misunderstandings," he said. "After a
while they stop seeing one another. Each member becomes
no different from anyone else passed on the street." He
stood; I stared at the ceiling as intently as I could, attempting to conjure up angels of my own.

"Everyone goes blind after so long," I said. "That night
Avi and I talked, he said anyone could become a Nazi once
they stopped seeing their Jews."

"Was it his child you had?" Lester asked. I couldn't see
his face from where I lay. He stood near my dresser, and I
knew he was examining the pair of booties I had hanging
on the knob of the mirror's frame. "These weren't yours,
were they? You'd have had them bronzed--

"I knitted them," I said.

"You had a baby?"

"Once."

"Recently?" he asked, walking over and sitting next to
me, gazing down as if he might peer directly into my mind.

"January," I said. "Things happen." As I shut my eyes he
leaned closer, whispering:

"Where's your baby?"

"Where're your parents?"

The effect was as desired; he said nothing else. After a
second or so he walked over and switched off the room's
light, returning to my bed and lying beside me, facing away.
As we bundled in silence my eyes accepted the dark, and I
saw in his silhouette his side's unnatural curve. Keeping my
touch as light as a butterfly's, I landed fingertips onto his
back, feeling hard rubber sheathed in satin, a tuft of lamb's
wool at the root of his spine. When I began to cry again I
pulled away from him. He clasped me as I rolled over. I
remembered my father holding me as a child, and I, feeling
so safe; I had never wanted to feel safe again, never before
asked for protection-never believed I deserved it when so
many others lived and died without imagining there could
be such a thing.

"I'm sorry, Joanna," he said. "It's difficult to tell what
you want to talk about."

"Feeling's mutual," I said, feeling my face become warmer and wetter. "You make me remember too much. I feel like
I'm on overload, my head can't hold it all-"

"It's impossible to remember too much," he said. "Everything should be remembered. So much is lost over time.
Every moment should be honored for having existed, even
the bad ones."

"Every moment," I repeated, knowing I could never
recall a thousandth of my own. "Why would They send a
messiah if They don't even know what'll happen? Why
would They risk it?"

"They have hopes," he said, placing his head on the
pillow next to mine, looking, in the dark, so tired.

"You said you could predict our futures," I said. "What
are they?"

"Unavoidable," he said, putting his arm across my shoul der. As he touched me I felt the fine hair rise from the nape
of my neck. Why do the heathem rage? Why not? A siren
outside sang through the night, the scream of an onrushing
train. "You know why everyone has this?" he asked,
tapping the shallow groove between my nose and upper lip.

"I don't even know what it's called."

"Before you were born you knew all there is," he told me.
"You knew the beginning and the end. You knew why the
dinosaurs died, why blue is blue. You knew why pain
doesn't ennoble us and why we wouldn't be human
without it. You knew what your life would hold." I touched
my face, brushing his finger with my own. "When it was
time for you to be born They pressed shut your lips, using
an angel's thumb to make the print. The angels cried for
having done it but knew it had to be done, you had to forget
all you knew upon entering this world, because the one
thing you'd have never known is how it feels, remembering
it again."

Though we could never be lovers, as I kissed him I knew
that feeling lovers know in their first minutes together, a
false commingling of fear and relief and the peace that
comes upon believing again that the world can be wonderful even in its illness. Our kiss, unlike an angel's thumb, did
not press our memories away. At nine Monday morning we
reported to work.

On Monday afternoon we discussed our newest project.
"Don't try to deny you didn't have your doubts," said
Thatcher. "I'd hate to think you were just humoring me."

"After Friday afternoon I never suspected anything
would actually come of this," said Bernard. "I thought he'd
race back to his flock and that'd be the last we heard of
him."

"Told you I made arrangements." Susie looked at her
husband; shook her head as if he'd told her he'd accidentally mowed down her flower beds.

"That shouldn't have changed things. By all rights he
should've sprung up like a toadstool somewhere else. But
perhaps hearing our words issuing from a different mouth
decided the vote." Bernard turned to me, smiling with lips
so perfectly curved, so remarkably still, that they might
have been painted on his face.

"She's learning," said Thatcher.

"So if all's roses, what's the problem?" Susie asked,
taking no shelter from the world behind sunglasses or
newspaper this morning. Not even the residue of a smile
showed on her face.

"The problem is that from here out I'll be working from
theory alone," said Bernard. "As I understand it, you want
to spread Macaffrey's cult of personality more thickly upon
the populace."

"Without any public connection to us, just yet," said
Thatcher. "We'll backchannel him, meantime, when we
need him for company work."

"But what's desired? You want the audience entertained
with sermons, blessings, the occasional odd miracle? You
want to see what ripples result from tossing him in the
pond?"