The Killer Is Dying (17 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“YOU GOING IN, OR WHAT?”

“I have a choice?”

“Probably just as soon shoot yourself in the head.”

“Come right down to it, that’s pretty much what it feels like.”

“I’ll wait out here.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Sure I do.”

The moon made a long shadow of him on the drive as Sayles got out. A middle-aged woman with a decided limp, nurse or nurse’s aide, waited inside and opened the front door for him. They went down a lime green hallway he didn’t remember from the time before. The walls had waist-high tread marks where stretchers had bumped and slid along them. Three workers sat around a long table at the nurse’s station. All looked up. Soft music played on a yellow plastic radio at one end of the table. To him it sounded like
hush-hush-hush
.

Sayles figured he’d spent his life not caring about the things most people did, not reacting the way people thought he should, not saying the things people always say without once looking behind the words, and now he just sat quietly by the bed. The woman went away, came back some time later to bring him a portable phone, the doctor calling from his home to explain what had happened and offer his condolences. We know you’re in pain right now, the doctor said.

Nothing like the pain she was in, Sayles thought. And the pain, he figured, is always there, something we carry with us all our lives, just dormant until something wakes it up, reminds us it’s there.

He thanked the doctor and sat there a while longer. When he climbed back in the car, Graves didn’t say anything. They pulled out, drove by Good Samaritan, tire stores, a Goodwill, a Mexican seafood restaurant, Glad Gals Lounge. Sayles thought about the yellow radio back at the hospice.

He was still thinking when Graves shut off the engine. They’d been sitting in front of his house a couple of minutes.

“Don’t want to go in, you can crash with me,” Graves said.

“Thanks. I appreciate all this, man.”

“It’s nothing.”

A 747 floated low overhead, gliding into Sky Harbor. Somewhere back in the oleanders behind the house, doves called.

“You ever think of yourself as a hero?” Graves said.

“You kidding?”

“Some of us, that’s what gets us on the job to start with. Do some good, stand up for what’s right. So you don’t?”

“Think of myself as a hero? No way.”

“Maybe other people do.”

“I doubt it.”

“But you never know, do you? Maybe other people look at you, they’ve been wondering why they go on when it’s so damn hard and getting harder all the time, and it keeps them on the job. Maybe they don’t know how to say that, even to themselves.”

“And maybe they go chasing some ghost, not because they think it’s worth doing, but because it’s important to a friend? You think I didn’t know that?”

Graves shook his head. “People.” He reached across and opened the passenger door. “Get out of here, Sayles, get some rest. See you in the morning.”

When he was young, he would get up early just to see the sunrise, to be a part of the morning. Sit out on the porch or in the yard under a tree, watch light gather, feel the new day come alive around him.

He can’t see much of anything now, but light and dark and shadow are left, so he knows it’s coming on to morning, and he feels the warmth on his skin here by the window. Curious how he is not asleep yet all these dreamlike images run through his head. Rooms, hallways, streets. Always going somewhere else, or preparing to. Always a mix of anticipation and apprehension. And animals—every sort of animal. Kangaroos at the door when he answers it. Rhino snouts poking in at the window. Slithery things in the bathtub. A silver fox sitting at the table with him.

He remembers the cruelty of children back home, who would catch garfish, prop their mouths open with sticks, and put them back in the water to rise and dive and rise again and finally drown. They’d say they were making submarines.

He remembers Black Dog, sick and covered with ants.

He remembers sitting on the porch in the rain, reading his medical books, finding his way around bodies. Life and disease, life and its end, so intertwined.

He remembers, with an emotion he cannot put a name to, his first kill.

He remembers the art teacher he had in college, who kept saying You have to look! You have to see! They’d be there, the model sitting on a chair, and this teacher, Miss Formby, walking around, watching what they were doing. Not just the model, she’d say. Look at what’s around the model. What’s between her and the chair. What’s above and below her. The silence that enfolds her. Draw that.

At the time he’d had precious little idea what she was going on about. Now he wonders if it’s only in the surround—what’s around us, the silence and charged air, the places, other people, the sunlight of a new day—that we exist at all.

The TV is on behind him, back in the room, volume turned low. A program about the Impressionists, which, he realizes, is what brought him to remembering Miss Formby. Something else starting up now. He hears the calls of birds.

Chattering and flapping and cawing, the birds woke him. A yellow cat was after them, moving slowly, body lowered, along the wall by the birds’ favorite tree. He banged on the window and the cat poured off the wall, to the other side. He’d hit the window frame with the side of his hand, but now he felt pain, the throb of it, in his damaged finger.

Stupid.

Tatters and tendrils of dreams curled about his head. Trees so thick that you couldn’t see the sky, so green that the faces of the men walking next to him were green too. A child—there one moment, then gone as it lifted its head. An office, everything pale green and blue, walls hung with framed posters of the circulatory system, bones and joints of the feet, flexion exercises. A man whose eyes go empty as he looks down, watches.

Strange.

Pulling on his T-shirt, he wondered about the stains. Not too bad, you’d almost think they were part of the seascape or the bear or whatever was on the shirt long ago before it faded. But time to do laundry, definitely. He’d been letting way too many things slide.

Like having his hand looked at, when he wasn’t sure it was healing right. Mrs. Flores said she’d take him to the free clinic, or Felix would, no problem. He’d go over later today, find out what time was good for them.

Right now, though, he had business to take care of, and should get started. He grabbed a bottle of juice and booted up the computer but soon found himself wandering the halls of cyberspace instead of working.

Where Is Traveler?

He came to us, changed our lives, and now he is gone.

Followed by the usual spate of conciliatory posts: Traveler will always be with us. We are all Traveler. Everything happens for a reason. Traveler
will
return.

Jimmie thought how, in the initial post, the loss shone out so purely, so strongly, and how the rest, instead of responding to that loss, tried to pretend it wasn’t there, to disguise it, dismantle it, deny it.

People leave us, he thought, they leave us and they’re gone. Family, youth, places we’ve lived, what was once important to us. All our lives are a going-away. Maybe we have to pretend that we’re going
toward
something, hang the image there in the air ahead. A better, more equitable world. Life everlasting in a place that looks like Scottsdale only better. A desert oasis with seventeen virgins. Because we can’t bear the thought that this is all there is. All there was.

He thought back to his dreams before the birds woke him this morning. He’d been sitting on a porch listening to rain come down. He couldn’t see the rain, couldn’t see anything really, but that didn’t seem strange, and he could feel the warmth blowing in through the screens, smell the dampness, the green, life. And there too, in the dream, he could hear the call of birds.

CHAPTER FORTY

SAYLES GOT OFF THE ELEVATOR. Lights were low, even in the halls. It was like being underwater, suspended between day and night. Standing still, you could sense, just out of hearing, the thrum of hundreds of engines: heaters, cooling machines, ventilators, centrifuges, cookstoves, recording devices, phones, intercoms, pumps.

Graves was waiting for him by the elevator.

“Come on back, we’re good.”

They passed through automatic doors into an ICU with beds arranged in a fan around a central nurse’s station. Each room in the unit was a different color, with paintings to match. The rooms were carpeted as well. Thinking what went on here, Sayles found himself wondering how often they had to tear the carpet out and replace it.

“I had an alert out to all area hospitals. One of the few things we knew about him is that the guy’s sick, right?”

Their man was in a pale blue room toward the back. Four IVs hung at bedside, three clear, one bright yellow. Sayles took in the room, the monitors. Heart rate high—artificially sustained, or trying to compensate for a blood pressure of 90/55? Not good either way.

“Kid found him and called it in. He was living in an apartment out back of their house. Boy gave his name as Christian. They found my alert and the old ER records about the same time. So here we are.”

“It’s him?”

“Has to be.”

The man looked well groomed even at three in the morning in this ghostly light wearing a hospital gown—hair pushed casually to one side, features full and symmetrical, nails clipped in careful rounds. Sayles peered closely at the skin on his arms, the whites of his eyes. Mid-sixties, he was figuring. Right around five-ten, one-eighty. Tight build.

“He had a directive in his wallet, signed and notarized, requesting no resuscitation, no extraordinary measures. That was the only document on him. They’re making him comfortable, as they say.”

“Yeah, they do say that.”

“Sorry, Sayles, I—”

“No problem. And thanks for the call.”

“Almost didn’t, considering.”

“Good that you did.”

A nurse, male, Hispanic, came in to spot-check vitals, nodding to them. He glanced up at the TV with its newsman or commentator mouthing away silently, and turned it off with one hand as he adjusted the drip on an IV with the other. Nodded again as he left.

They stood quietly looking down at the man, his breathing so shallow it barely showed.

“Hard to imagine what his life must have been like,” Graves said.

“Hard to imagine what anyone’s life is like, from the outside.”

“Yeah, we see that every day, don’t we.” Graves looked up at the empty screen, then at the window, also dark. “How many men you think he killed?”

“I don’t think it matters anymore.”

“Yeah, I get that, too.” After a minute he added: “You think he knows we’re here?”

“Anybody’s guess,” Sayles said. “Staff always tells you, Talk to them, it’ll make a difference, they’ll know.”

Sayles bent close to the bed. In that moment he thought of all the things he might say—about understanding, about what mattered now, about it being okay to let go, about finding rest. But what he whispered, lips inches from the man’s ear, was something much simpler:
You’re not alone
.

He’d been sitting by the window, feeling the sun on his skin, his mind roaming. Floating. The jungle was there, and many rooms in many cities, many faces. Animals.

He remembers that much, then nothing.

It is dark again now, he can tell that, so time has passed. How much, he has no idea.

Two men stand near him talking. Another was there, then gone.

He wonders if he could move, should he try. Or speak. Surprised that he feels nothing of what one might reasonably expect: fear, grief, anticipation. Loss, yes, how could he not feel that. But most of all what he feels is a strange peace coming over him, filling him.

It is almost, he thinks, over.

One of the men bends to speak to him.

And now he remembers. A program about dogs in Moscow, swelling up in the room behind him—that’s what had been on as he sat there in the morning sunlight. Adapting to changing conditions, dogs had learned to use Moscow’s complicated subway system. Many were strays; others rode in daily from suburban locations to take advantage of the bounties at the city’s center.

When capitalism came to Russia, the old industrial complexes were shoehorned out of the city to make room for shopping centers, restaurants, and apartment blocks. Dogs, who had long used these as shelters, moved with them—and now commuted.

In the city, though color-blind, they had learned to cross the street with traffic lights. They were so much loved, so much a part of the city, that when one of the strays was stabbed to death, officials erected a bronze statue to it. Others fed the dogs, built winter shelters for them, shared their seats on the metro.

The dogs, scientists say, have an exact sense of time. They know their destination, their regular stops.

Moscow’s dogs work, another authority said, for peaceful coexistence. On the metro they are affable, even docile. They rarely beg for food, which is given them anyway. They cross streets with the other pedestrians. They are doing what we all do: their level best to adapt to a world forever changing around us.

He remembered.

He had turned his head to the television, and for a moment, just for that single moment, his vision returned. That was the last thing he saw, the last thing he would see. A dog standing on the platform waiting for its train.

Jimmie turned his head through moonlight to look again at the clock. A little after four in the morning. No birds now. Soon, though. Been in this bed so long, and so long awake, that he felt the grit on the sheets against his skin. And when he threw back the sheet, the sweetish sour odor of his body drifted up to him.

Had he remembered bills this month? And for that matter, had he had any money coming in recently? When was the last time he’d gone hunting for bargains? Man, he used to love doing that. Things were changing. He started to understand a little how his parents would lose track, how they couldn’t keep up.

He’d always paid such close attention. He had to get back to doing that.

He had gone to sleep almost at once, then woke an hour later feeling … empty? He was lying in exactly the same position as when he first lay down, left side, knees drawn up, face turned into the pillow. He hadn’t moved.

For a moment upon waking he thought he heard music far off, then decided it was nothing more than random sounds around him, wind, water in pipes, the old house settling, that his mind turned to something more.

He lifted his hand, the finger cleaned and rebandaged before he went to bed, into the light. Sirens started up close by, at the firehouse three streets over, he assumed, then abruptly stopped.

Maybe he’d get up after all, fix some food. Whack another finger.

Or check out his usual sites. But that prospect didn’t do much more for him right now than looking for stuff to buy and sell. It felt to him as though something had changed forever, and he didn’t even know what the something was. And that, the pretense of it, made him laugh, at the very moment the sirens started up again. He listened to them squall down the street out of hearing, off to whatever fire, accident, emergency waited. How frail our hold is, he thought. And what a small wind it takes to blow it all apart.

He understood then why he’d awakened, what the emptiness was.

He had been dreamless.

The dreams that had come to fill his nights, the dreams that had become so much a part of his life—they were not there. And he felt their absence with the same uncomprehending despair a man feels at the loss of arms, legs, the ability to stand and walk. An ache, an emptiness.

Jimmie looks to the window where a moth flutters at the pane, across which car lights periodically sweep. With no premeditation and no true realization of what he is doing, Jimmie parts his lips and says quietly: “
Are you there?
” He says it again, and waits.

Later, with dawn advancing tile by tile across the floor, he’ll get up and go to his computer. He will sit there a long time, listening to the sound of the day starting up around him, before turning the computer on. It will be many long months, a winter and a spring, before he dreams again.