The Judas Glass (40 page)

“You're trying to stall me, get the call traced,” I said.

Stella sighed. “Christ, she's starting to eat it. It might be good for her. Extra fiber.” She changed the subject, a habit of hers, quick switches, one of the many things I liked about her. “I don't think Connie has a case.”

“Think of the publicity,” I said. “I can see the headlines—
Wife Won't Share Insurance with Dead Husband.”

“You know Connie. She loves a struggle. She still argues that you aren't married because you're legally dead.”

“Feeble argument, don't you think?”

“You know what Dr. Opal says, don't you?”

“Tell me.”

“He was over here a few nights ago. They watch everyone who ever knew you. They're sick of it. I'm glad, in a way. I think the kind of person who wants to be a cop deserves to be punished.”

“What does Dr. Opal—”

“He says you must be Rebecca, disguised as Richard. That's why they keep the bones hidden, top-secret. Maybe they'll use them as bait some day.”

“What do you think?”

“I used to know you—Richard—pretty well, a long time ago. I think I loved you. I never told you that.” She paused, perhaps self-conscious, thinking of all of this going on tape, technicians listening. “I think you're Richard Stirling.”

“New and improved,” I suggested.

She laughed. “You give me a headache, Richard. I hope they never find you.”

My parents are perfect in their deception. One might suppose they had been trained as spies. They have never seen me, they told anyone who asked. That room my father rents, that carpeted cellar with a piano, is a secret to everyone but my small family. The key is simplicity. Keep only one secret, and build a plain box around it.

Now Matilda was half an hour late.

I knew what was happening. This was the night it would unravel. This cellar room was painted green halfway up, and gray the rest of the way, with an acoustical-tile ceiling, squares filled with round little holes. A calendar was pinned to the wall, Crater Lake the image for April. A former tax accountant's office, Matilda had said, comfortable and spartan at the same time.

Matilda thought of me as Richard Stirling, and as her old friend and employer she kept me supplied with gossip, and sometimes with a plastic tube of whole blood she had a relative misappropriate from the medical school. Some day, I had always known, they would follow Matilda here, or subvert her, convince her of the harm I was doing, persuade her that she owed too much to the living.

There was a step, the key, the background rush of sounds, traffic, far-off voices.

I knew at once, but I asked her a philosophical question, a legal quibble, and she was ready with an answer. “Of course you're a person,” Matilda argued. “You can identify yourself, sign your name, bear witness. You can be sworn in under oath. You are of sound mind, and you can be fingerprinted. Legally, you are a human being.”

I took flowers from her arms, yellow roses, seven of them. “And medically?”

“Medically,” she said dismissively, as though the medical point of view was beneath notice. She was going to law school, and insisted some day Richard Stirling's name would be on the letterhead with hers. “You'd need to find a doctor who would testify that you can be defined as alive despite what Connie's expert might demonstrate. It would be very easy. There is nothing more compelling than an established fact, like a person standing up in person,
here I am.”

I lay the roses on the desk, on the green blotter. I had to ask, to give her an opportunity.

“There were two in tennis shorts tonight,” she responded. “I lost them at Pier 39, by the clown selling helium balloons.”

Again, I offered her another chance to be truthful. “Did they give you these flowers?”

She hated the words as she spoke them. “I thought you would like them.”

“You don't have to lie to me, Matilda,” I said. “Don't be upset. They courted you for days, bought you dinner, gave you things. One of them is a bit of a romantic.”

“I am not lying,” she said, turning to me, her hands against the chair behind her. She was plumper than ever, and there was a wheeze of asthma in her voice.

I smiled. “They told you it would be so much better if they took me in. It was Dr. Opal. He's very convincing. Maybe he fell a little bit in love with you. Yellow roses. It's touching.”

“It isn't true.”

I put my finger to my lips, telling her not to say another word.

She tried to say
no
, but she was fighting tears.

“Because they are right,” I said, “in their way. Don't think for a moment that you have betrayed me. You haven't. Whatever happens to me is an old story.”

The silence was the balancing point. Truth is all we have. In that is our strength, our lives. As soon as we begin to keep our secrets, as soon as we knit our fictions, the color drains, the stars pale, the land weakens beneath our feet.

Among the many things I missed, I missed drinking water, standing at a sink and filling a tumbler, like this plastic container here in the corner, emblazoned with a football player making a difficult catch, his body horizontal, suspended in the air. “Where are they?”

She steadied herself. “Just outside.”

“Can they hear us?”

Her eyes were bright. Anguish resembled some other emotion—wonderment, startled rapture. “They said it would hurt my career, my family—”

“I should not have put you in this position.”

“What will they do to you, Richard?”

“They won't hurt you. They're too frightened of me.”

She said, “They promised me they would protect you.”

And I could not help myself—I laughed.

“Don't go out there, Richard,” she said.

I turned back with a smile. “Don't you trust them?”

But I never knew what trap they would devise. I could never be certain. Each time I faced them there was danger. Even now I could smell gasoline, and the impatient sweat of men. It was the fire that made me want to stay where I was, behind walls. It was out there, explosive, waiting for me.

61

If there were nothing left of human kind but our books of law, a visitor from across the universe would reconstruct what sort of beings we were. Here were our failures, our crimes. Here were our contracts, our promises. I was to a living person what a law is to a day, its counterpart. I was an echo given flesh, the truth behind the ironist's mock. As though a footprint took on an existence of its own.

The crack in the door caressed me as I eased outward, luxuriating in the humidity, the warm evening.

I lingered, so much whiff from a quenched candle, before I stood in human form again.

The vigil was tense. The skepticism was evident in the way they waited, holding the tiny receivers in their ears with fingers, deaf to everything but the sound of Matilda, following my last, whispered advice,
make some phone calls. Act like everything is
normal. They frowned, a few thin-faced men. There used to be so many, so sure of themselves. These were figures out of World War Two, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, helmeted men with tanks of gasoline like aqualungs, flame throwers.

They turned to each other. When was I coming out? Why wasn't I saying anything in there, just the sound of Matilda arguing on the phone.
Call Connie
—
she always has something to say
.

I passed among them and they did not see me. Not until I took Dr. Opal's hand. “Don't harm Matilda,” I said into his startled eyes.

“I don't want them to hurt you, Richard,” he said. If he partly understood my nature, when he looked at me he saw his old friend. He had put on weight, and was glowing, robust, the search for me making him years younger.

“You know how important you are to us. I would give my own life—my own personal, individual life—to keep you safe.” He wanted to believe this. In the end he had been more doctor than friend. He wanted me for science, for his own career.

Men closed around us, hitching belts, adjusting valves. A pilot light flickered. One of the funnels spouted a preliminary gout.

Maybe to keep me safe, the old Richard Stirling would have said, but not to keep me free.

“Wait!” called Dr. Opal.

There was a shouted apology from one of the men as a geranium burst into flames. A wheezy blast from behind singed the back of my head. Another weapon blistered the paint from a parked car, the lion's-head of flame illuminating a gloved fist, a plastic visor.

“Wait a minute!” called Dr. Opal. “You're not supposed to be in such a hurry!” he barked, face to face with one of the military men. “You'll never see anything like this again! Never! And you're so afraid you can't wait!”

You might as well be quiet, I wanted to tell him. Words can only do some much.

“You can still come with me,” said Dr. Opal. He reached out to me, his eyes bright. “There's no way you'll survive. You can help people, under my authority. Think of the discoveries we could—” He must have realized how he sounded, how false. He looked back at the tense faces. He wanted to vanquish them all with a look, send them all away. His voice was quiet with feeling when he said, “There could be just the two of us.”

Fire made a sound like a crowd cheering, an ovation, victory at last. Men hurried for protection. Flame blasted a patch of lawn. A scrap of paper in the gutter vanished with a puff.

Fly
, Dr. Opal was praying.

Fly away
.

I ascended, wafted upward by the heat.

If I had a companion this was where he would rise up to meet me. My wings filled. Closing my eyes, I beheld all of this with my voice, carried it on my tongue. Spiraling higher, I was lost in the clouds, a leaf falling into the lake of sky.

Until the air was so thin my lungs ached, so cold I was frosty, each flutter of wings a beat weaker. The air dissipated, my spine iron with cold.

I banked, skimming downward, falling west. Something guided me, that promise in me I had been hearing for weeks. I dropped down, losing control of my flight, until I glided close to the water, salt seasoning each breath. It was warm here, and the fog broke up, stars and moon above.

Mercy, cruelty. Night, day. Even I have made this mistake, thinking there is silence, and then here on the facing page is music, as though the two were opposite. How could I have been so wrong? When I glided over the glass ocean I was surprised.

More than surprised—I was shocked. And for a moment I could not believe what I saw.

I thought he had returned, and he had never left me, this reflection that shrank and swelled below me, a black flame, wings in the mirror of the sea.

62

Stella was right.

I will never feel Rebecca's embrace again. I will never make love to her. And Rebecca will never take Richard in, whispering his name.

Some night I will take the warm arm extending from across the threshold, and cross into that foreign country that so resembles this. What is it reflecting now, that mirror in the next room?
We don't have all day, my father used to say. You can't look at yourself forever
.

Stella is on the phone in the dining room. It's a roomy apartment. One of Stella's clients, a man with complicated Las Vegas debts, has vanished. Until he returns I experiment with his clothes.

He tended toward size thirty-eight, and as Richard I am a forty-three. I can see why debts sucked the client dry, custom-made shirts, hand-lasted shoes. I lean against the desk in his dressing gown, a present, I surmise, from a woman who could not have known him well. It is a beautiful blue, shimmering, and it fits me.

“Connie, consider this. Maybe,” Stella says, “he still has feelings for you, too. I know he feels happy you're going to go ahead with the baby.”

Now and then Stella passes the archway and our eyes meet. She rolls hers, and I give her a Richard-Stirling smile, the accustomed role, another consecutive night, standing-room only. I owe this to Stella, letting her play lawyer, but I have no interest in the outcome. Or do I? Maybe it brings back pleasant associations.

Connie and Stella make complicated arrangements, pay phones, airport phone booths, cellular devices. “It's not the money,” Stella is saying. In law, when they say it's not the money you can be sure it is. My fingers tingle. There is somewhere I have to be tonight. But I still have time.

“Don't talk to me about cash,” says Stella. “He has no earthly use for it.”

Connie's voice is so far away it makes me feel fond of her, urgent as she is, grasping.

Tonight Stella has brought pictures of her baby, pink and open-eyed on a white flannel pillowcase. I don't tell her that I remember her baby well.

I wait for full evening. I can look out the window and see someone come home from work this time every night. There is a narrow driveway, a manicured square of lawn on either side. Each night the young man stops the Toyota, sets the brake, steps before the headlights and stoops to unlock the garage.

“Maybe he likes to pretend,” I hear Stella saying. “Maybe it lets him imagine he's a living man again. I mean, how can a dead man get a divorce?”

The car barely fits. The garage is small, and there are boxes, old clothes, piles of old magazines competing for space. He pulls the garage door down, and then locks it with a padlock. He gives it a tug. He tugs it more times than he needs to, testing it compulsively.

Tonight he skips back down the steps and I think at first that he is obsessed, as usual, with locking the garage. He unfastens the padlock, swings open the door, and vanishes into the interior.

I am on my feet, parting the curtains.

“Of course you still have strong feelings for him.
I
have strong feelings for him,” Stella says. “He has that effect on people.”

The young man hurries out with a large red squirt gun, the size of an actual assault weapon, two of them, one under each arm. He fires one up at the street light, an arcing stitch of water. He has brought home these toys as a surprise.