Prayers to Broken Stones (6 page)

Bremen left the hospital and his dying wife and drove east to the sea. The roads were thick with Philadelphians fleeing the city for the weekend, and Bremen had to concentrate on traffic, leaving only the most tenuous of touches in his wife’s mind. Gail was sleeping. Her dreams were fitful and drug-induced. She was seeking her mother through endlessly interlinked rooms filled with Victorian furniture.

As Bremen crossed the pine barrens, the images of the dreams slid between the evening shadows of reality. Gail awoke just as Bremen was leaving the parkway. For a few seconds after she awoke the pain was not with her. She opened her eyes, and the evening sunlight falling across the blue blanket made her think—for only a moment—that it was morning on the farm. Her thoughts reached out for her husband just as the pain and dizziness struck behind her left eye. Bremen grimaced and dropped the coin he was handing to the toll-booth attendant.

“What’s the matter, buddy?”

Bremen shook his head, fumbled out a dollar, and thrust it blindly at the man. Throwing his change in the Triumph’s cluttered console, he concentrated on pushing
the car’s speed to its limit. Gail’s pain faded, but her confusion washed over him in a wave of nausea.

She quickly gained control despite the shifting curtains of fear that fluttered at the tightly held mindshield. She subvocalized, concentrating on narrowing the spectrum to a simulacrum of her voice.

“Hi, Jerry.”

“Hi, yourself, kiddo.” He sent the thought as he turned onto the exit for Long Beach Island. He shared the visual—the starting green of grass and pine trees overlaid with the gold of August light, the sports car’s shadow leaping along the curve of asphalt. Suddenly the unmistakable salt freshness of the Atlantic came to him, and he shared that with her also.

The entrance to the seaside community was disappointing: dilapidated seafood restaurants, overpriced cinder-block motels, endless marinas. But it was reassuring in its familiarity to both of them, and Bremen concentrated on seeing all of it. Gail began to relax and appreciate the ride. Her presence was so real that Bremen caught himself turning to speak aloud to her. The pang of regret and embarrassment was sent before he could stifle it.

The island was cluttered with families unpacking station wagons and carrying late dinners to the beach. Bremen drove north to Barnegat Light. He glanced to his right and caught a glimpse of some fishermen standing along the surf, their shadows intersecting the white lines of breakers.

Monet,
thought Gail, and Bremen nodded, although he had actually been thinking of Euclid.

Always the mathematician,
thought Gail, and then her voice faded as the pain rose. Half-formed sentences shredded like clouds in a gale.

Bremen left the Triumph parked near the lighthouse and walked through the low dunes to the beach. He threw down the tattered blanket that they had carried so many times to just this spot. There was a group of children running along the surf. A girl of about nine, all long white legs in a suit two years too small, pranced on the wet sand in an intricate, unconscious choreography with the sea.

The light was fading between the Venetian blinds. A
nurse smelling of cigarettes and stale talcum powder came in to change the IV bottle and take a pulse. The intercom in the hall continued to make loud, imperative announcements, but it was difficult to understand them through the growing haze of pain. The new doctor arrived about ten o’clock, but Gail’s attention was riveted on the nurse who carried the blessed needle. The cotton swab on her arm was a delightful preliminary to the promised surcease of pain behind her eye. The doctor was saying something.

“… your husband? I thought he would be staying the night.”

“Right here, doctor,” said Gail. She patted the blanket and the sand.

Bremen pulled on his nylon windbreaker against the chill of the night. The stars were occluded by a high cloud layer that allowed only a few to show through. Far out to sea, an improbably long oil tanker, its lights blazing, moved along the horizon. The windows of the beach homes behind Bremen cast yellow rectangles on the dunes.

The smell of steak being grilled came to him on the breeze. Bremen tried to remember whether he had eaten that day or not. He considered going back to the convenience store near the lighthouse to get a sandwich but remembered an old Payday candy bar in his jacket pocket and contented himself with chewing on the rock-hard wedge of peanuts.

Footsteps continued to echo in the hall. It sounded as if entire armies were on the march. The rush of footsteps, clatter of trays, and vague chatter of voices reminded Gail of lying in bed as a child and listening to her parents’ parties downstairs.

Remember the party where we met?
thought Bremen.

Chuck Gilpen had insisted that Bremen go along. Bremen had never had much use for parties. He was lousy at small talk, and the psychic tension and neurobabble always left him with a headache from maintaining his mindshield tightly for hours. Besides, it was his first week teaching graduate tensor calculus and he knew that he should be home boning up on basic principles. But he had gone. Gilpen’s nagging and the fear of being labeled a social misfit in his new academic community had brought
Bremen to the Drexel Hill townhouse. The music was palpable half a block away, and had he driven there by himself, he would have gone home then. He was just inside the door—someone had pressed a drink in his hand—when suddenly he sensed another mindshield quite near him. He had put out a gentle probe, and immediately the force of Gail’s thoughts swept across him like a searchlight.

Both were stunned. Their first reaction had been to raise their mindshields and roll up like frightened armadillos. Each soon found that useless against the unconscious probes of the other. Neither had ever encountered another telepath of more than primitive, untapped ability. Each had assumed that he or she was a freak—unique and unassailable. Now they stood naked before each other in an empty place. Suddenly, almost without volition, they flooded each other’s mind with a torrent of images, self-images, half-memories, secrets, sensations, preferences, perceptions, hidden fears, echoes, and feelings. Nothing was held back. Every petty cruelty committed, sexual shame experienced, and prejudice harbored poured out along with thoughts of past birthday parties, ex-lovers, parents, and an endless stream of trivia. Rarely had two people known each other as well after fifty years of marriage. A few minutes later they met for the first time.

The beacon from Barnegat Light passed over Bremen’s head every twenty-four seconds. There were more lights burning out at sea now than along the dark line of beach. The wind came up after midnight, and Bremen wrapped the blanket around himself tightly. Gail had refused the needle when the nurse had last made her rounds, but her mindtouch was still clouded. Bremen forced the contact through sheer strength of will. Gail had always been afraid of the dark. Many had been the times during their six years of marriage that he reached out in the night with his mind or arm to reassure her. Now she was the frightened little girl again, left alone upstairs in the big old house on Burlingame Avenue. There were things in the darkness beneath her bed.

Bremen reached through her confusion and pain and shared the sound of the sea with her. He told her stories about the antics of Gernisavien, their calico cat. He lay in
the hollow of the sand to match his body with hers. Slowly she began to relax, to surrender her thoughts to his. She even managed to doze a few times, and her dreams were the movement of stars between clouds and the sharp smell of the Atlantic. Bremen described the week’s work at the farm—the subtle beauty of his Fourier equations across the chalkboard in his study and the sunlit satisfaction of planting a peach tree by the front drive. He shared memories of their ski trip to Aspen and the sudden shock of a searchlight reaching in to the beach from an unseen ship out at sea. He shared what little poetry he had memorized, but the words kept sliding into images and feelings.

The night drew on, and Bremen shared the cold clarity of it with his wife, adding to each image the warm overlay of his love. He shared trivia and hopes for the future. From seventy-five miles away he reached out and touched her hand with his. When he drifted off to sleep for only a few minutes, he sent her his dreams.

Gail died just before the false light of dawn touched the sky.

The head of the mathematics department at Haverford urged Bremen to take a leave or a full sabbatical if he needed it. Bremen thanked him and resigned.

Dorothy Parks in the psychology department spent a long evening explaining the mechanics of grief to Bremen. “You have to understand, Jeremy,” she said, “that moving is a common mistake made by people who have just suffered a serious loss. You may think that a new environment will help you forget, but it just postpones the inevitable confrontation with grief.”

Bremen listed attentively and eventually nodded his agreement. The next day he put the farm up for sale, sold the Triumph to his mechanic on Conestoga Road, and took the bus to the airport. Once there, he went to the United Airlines counter and bought a ticket for the next departing flight.

For a year Bremen worked in central Florida, loading produce at a shipping center near Tampa. The next year Bremen did not work at all. He fished his way north from
the Everglades to the Chattooga River in northern Georgia. In March he was arrested as a vagrant in Charleston, South Carolina. In May he spent two weeks in Washington, during which he left his room only to go to liquor stores and the Congressional Library. He was robbed and badly beaten outside of the Baltimore bus station at 2
A.M
. on a June night. Leaving the hospital the next day, he returned to the bus station and headed north to visit his sister in New York. His sister and her husband insisted that he stay several weeks, but he left early on the third morning, propping a note up against the salt shaker on the kitchen table. In Philadelphia he sat in Penn Station and read the help-wanted ads. His progress was as predictable as the elegant, ellipsoid mathematics of a yo-yo’s path.

Robby was sixteen, weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds, and had been blind, deaf, and retarded since birth. His mother’s drug addiction during pregnancy and a placental malfunction had shut off Robby’s senses as surely as a sinking ship condemns compartment after compartment to the sea by the shutting of watertight doors.

Robby’s eyes were the sunken, darkened caverns of the irrevocably blind. The pupils, barely visible under drooping, mismatched lids, tracked separately in random movements. The boy’s lips were loose and blubbery, his teeth gapped and carious. At sixteen, he already had the dark down of a mustache on his upper lip. His black hair stood out in violent tufts, and his eyebrows met above the bridge of his broad nose.

The child’s obese body was balanced precariously on grub-white, emaciated legs. Robby had learned how to walk at age eleven but still would stagger only a few paces before toppling over. He moved in a series of pigeon-toed lurches, pudgy arms pulled as tight as broken wings, wrists cocked at an improbable angle, fingers separate and extended. Like so many of the retarded blind, his favorite motion was a perpetual rocking with his hand fanning above his sunken eyes as if to cast shadows into the pit of darkness.

He did not speak. His only sounds were occasional,
meaningless giggles and a rare squeal of protest, which sounded like nothing so much as an operatic falsetto.

Robby had been coming to the Chelton Day School for the Blind for six years. His life before that was unknown. He had been discovered by a social worker visiting Robby’s mother in connection with a court-ordered methadone-treatment program. The door to the apartment had been left open, and the social worker heard noises. The boy had been sealed into the bathroom by the nailing of a piece of plywood over the bottom half of the door. There were wet papers on the tile floor, but Robby was naked and smeared with his own excrement. A tap had been left on, and water filled the room to the depth of an inch or two. The boy was rolling fitfully in the mess and making mewling noises.

Robby was hospitalized for four months, spent five weeks in the county home, and was then returned to the custody of his mother. In accordance with further court orders, he was dutifully bussed to Chelton Day School for five hours of treatment a day, six days a week. He made the daily trip in darkness and silence.

Robby’s future was as flat and featureless as a line extending nowhere, holding no hope of intersection.

“Shit, Jer, you’re going to have to watch after the kid tomorrow.”

“Why me?”

“Because he won’t go into the goddamn pool, that’s why. You saw him today. Smitty just lowered his legs into the water, and the kid started swinging and screaming. Sounded like a bunch of cats had started up. Dr. Whilden says he stays back tomorrow. She says that the van is too hot for him to stay in. Just keep him company in the room till Jan McLellan’s regular aide gets back from vacation.”

“Great,” said Bremen. He pulled his sweat-plastered shirt away from his skin. He had been hired to drive the school van, and now he was helping to feed, dress, and babysit the poor bastards. “Great. That’s just great, Bill. What am I supposed to do with him for an hour and a half while you guys are at the pool?”

“Watch him. Try to get him to work on the zipper book. You ever see that page in there with the bra stuff—the eyes and hooks? Let him work on that. I useta practice on that with my eyes shut.”

“Great,” said Bremen. He closed his eyes against the glare of the sun.

Bremen sat on the front stoop and poured the last of the scotch into his glass. It was long past midnight, but the narrow street teemed with children playing. Two black teenagers were playing the dozens while their friends urged them on. A group of little girls jumped double dutch under the streetlamp. Insects milled in the light and seemed to dance to the girls’ singing. Adults sat on the steps of identical rowhouses and watched one another dully. No one moved much. It was very hot.