Waking the Dead (52 page)

“Is your heart sinking?” asked Dina Jensen.

I shook my head no. And it wasn’t. The squalor was oddly comforting.

“I didn’t want to make any final decisions about how to put it all together until we had a chance to talk,” said Dina.

“That’s all right,” I said.

“We hadn’t even gotten the phones straight until yesterday,” she said, shrugging.

Just then, one of the Capitol guards tapped on the open door. He was a man in his fifties with silver hair; the sole of his left shoe was built up four or five inches to compensate for a short leg. He carried a gun on one hip and on the other was a walkie-talkie.

“Oh hello, Harry,” said Dina.

“Hello, Miss Jensen,” said the security guard. He had an airy, wavering voice, as full of holes as a fishnet. “I thought I heard you here.” He smiled and glanced at me and then shifted his watery blue eyes back to Dina: he was waiting to be introduced with all the slightly injured pride and propriety of a nineteenth-century suitor.

“This is Congressman Pierce, Harry,” said Dina.

“Hi,” I said, putting out my hand.

“Will you be working late?” he asked me.

“I think so,” I said. “Tonight, anyhow.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize,” said Dina.

“No, that’s OK,” I said. “You go on and do what you were going to do. I’d do better on my own right now, anyhow. I just want to go through some things.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Absolutely.” I heard my voice as if it were echoing. Didn’t know if it was the room or just nerves.

“Well, I’ll be going off duty in an hour,” said Harry. “I’ll leave word that you’re here and when you get ready to leave you just let us know. OK?”

A few minutes later, I was alone. I closed the door between the reception office and the outer corridor and with my back against that door I looked around me. Cardboard boxes from Mayflower Movers were in a druidical semicircle around the two desks, each one identified by Dina’s bold hand:
REFERENCE MATERIALS, SUPPLIES, CLIPPINGS, STATIONERY
. There were framed maps on the sofa, newspapers piled onto the chairs, lamps with their cords coiled around their bases stuck in the corners. The wastepaper baskets were filled with white bags from a nearby takeout restaurant, each one printed with a picture of a steaming cup of coffee in which the steam dreamily takes the shape of a doughnut, a hamburger, a roasted chicken.The overhead lights were fluorescent and one of the tubes was dying, shuddering slightly and singing that insecty siren song as it went. I turned it off by the wall switch and the room leapt back and disappeared: I was in total darkness. I turned the lights on again and walked slowly from the reception office into another, smaller office that would be used for staff, and then, through that, into the larger of the offices, which would be mine.

My desk had been assembled and placed near the window— though the window itself, like a window in a desperate hotel, looked only onto the dark neutrality of a nearby wall. A bouquet of flowers had been placed on the glass-topped desk. Carnations, daisies: very affordable. I sniffed them but they had no scent. They were stuck in a green vase and there was a card taped to a sprig of the greenery. It said “Welcome to Washington!” and it was signed by Dina and four other holdovers from Carmichael’s staff. I felt a flush of emotion, as if I actually held in my hand a genuine token of their goodwill toward me. When I realized how ridiculous it was to feel anything like that, I squeezed my eyes shut, as if the darkness within me was lesson enough. I shoved the card into my back pocket. I was wearing a blue suit, like any other defendant. Someone in the boiler room must have been defying the energy-conscious president because the radiators were pumping out heat and it was hellish in my office. I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, rolled up my sleeves. I sat on the edge of my desk. The desk was clean except for a small box marked
CORRESPONDENCE
. That piqued my interest. Nothing like reading someone else’s mail, though it did occur to me that if the box had been left on the desk it was probably meant for my eyes.

I was thirsty. The heat in that room. The inevitable dehydration of a long rolling journey to madness. I slid off the desk with the idea of finding something in the office to drink and then coming back and looking through the box marked
CORRESPONDENCE
. I wandered around, hoping to spy a can of Coke someone had forgotten. No luck there, but there was a small room off the middle office in which there was a tiny refrigerator and a sink. Next to the sink was a red plastic drainboard in which stood six plastic coffee cups, each bearing the Illinois state seal. I picked up one of the cups and felt an indescribable sense of unease, as if all my inner breath had suddenly become a storm. I placed the cup down next to the sink, as if letting it go would stop whatever was happening to me. But of course that did no good. I was aware of the earth’s ceaseless pilgrimage through space and heard the sound of the wind that was displaced by the long hopeless orbit. I turned the faucet on and brownish water came thundering into the aluminum sink. I waited for the stream to clear and then put my hand into it. I couldn’t tell if it was hot or cold; I could only feel the force of its beating against my palm.

I pressed my fingers against my face, hoping the wetness could revive me, but all I was really aware of was the weight of my hand over my eyes and nose, like the hand of an attacker. I had only one coherent thought: I’ve got to get out of here, and I believe what I meant was not to get out of that office, or even that building, or even that city, but out of my life, out of the maze through which I’d been walking with all that appalling confidence, as if will were a true compass and desire a true destination, but which now suddenly revealed itself as a path leading only to itself, a mere form of confinement, a path fate places you on when it has nothing better for you to do.

I turned off the water. The absence of that sound made things a little easier. I stooped down and opened the refrigerator. There was one can of root beer and I took it out. It was one of those pop-top cans, in which you pull a tab and a small aluminum circle goes down into the soda and lets you drink through the hole. It struck me as odd that a society that puts such a high value on sterility in its packaging would think nothing of drinking soft drinks into which had been immersed the outside of the can, without any particular thought that those little disks we were dunking in our soda might be covered with bacteria. I stared at the can of soda and wondered how it could be that no one had thought of this.

That was when I heard a slight dull tapping on the outer door. At first I thought it was just something else coming loose in my brain but when I listened closely it seemed clearly to be coming from without and so I moved into the reception office and stood near the cartons and listened again. And this time I was certain someone was at the door. I thought it was old Harry or his replacement, making the rounds. I turned around to see what time it was. It was just seven o’clock and the imprisoned cuckoo was once again trying to escape through the taped doors. Its mechanical nightmarish voice seemed to have gone hoarse with frustration.

“Who is it?” I said. But there was no answer. I waited for whoever it was to make the next move.

And then mere was a knocking again, a shy tapping, a one-knuckler. Three fast taps and then two slow ones. I walked quickly to the door and opened it, thinking that now the best thing to do was to get them before they had a chance to get away—like an old solitary man trying to catch the neighborhood brats who’ve been pounding on his storm door and then running away.

And so I opened the door and Sarah was standing there and the first thing I felt was an overwhelming
calmness
. She was wearing a black wool coat and the wool was sparkling because there was rain on it and her dark hair was braided around her head and her dark hair was sparkling from the rain, too. She put her fingers to her lips when she saw me, the fingers of her left hand, and her right hand was in a red woolen glove and her right hand was holding the other red woolen glove. Her eyes were a lighter green than I had been remembering and they were larger, too. I looked at her and I was waiting for the calmness to turn, to break out into something fast and fierce, but the calmness only deepened, like the delicate color on a pale wall will deepen when you give it its second coat of paint.

She looked behind her and when she faced me again I saw she was afraid. She stepped into the office and I closed the door and something told me to lock it so I did. The smell of rain came off her, a wild smell, strange and inhuman. She had a scratch, a red line, in the deep crease between her chin and her lower lip. Her lips were pale; her teeth looked uncared for. And older. Of course older. A few more years than the actual years that had passed. She wasn’t really beautiful. I remember thinking that. I jiggled the door to make certain it was locked and now we were facing each other and still neither of us had spoken. It was very grave and full standing there with her, but I needed to touch her and of course she understood that and did not move her hand or even her eyes as I reached for her and placed my fingers on her bare hand—so cold, but her hands had always been a little icy, even in summer, even when we made love and they touched the small of my back, my hips, guiding me.

It was not spirit. I will say this one more time. It was not spirit, it was flesh. It was flesh and it was bone and it was wool and it was rain and, above all, above every other thing, it was her, it was Sarah.

“You knew I would come,” she said, looking at her hand where I had touched it.

I shook my head no.

“But didn’t you see me? I was up there, looking down, when you were standing in front of Tip O’Neill taking your oath. I saw you look up.”

“I didn’t see you.”

And then abruptly, as if I had fallen through a trapdoor in my own soul, the calmness was gone and I had a terrible feeling that what I was going to do next was strike her with all my strength, right across the face, and this thought was so powerful that it showed itself to me and I could see myself hitting her and see her staggering back after the blow and even that was not enough to express the anger I felt. I stepped away from her and looked down at the ground. I was breathing heavily. I could hear my breath and it was bringing me back.

“I don’t know how I did it,” she said, very softly.

“Did what?” I asked.

“I don’t know how I stayed away from you for so long.”

And then, as if by inspiration, I took her hand and pressed it to my lips, her strong, cold hand, which still tasted of her glove and smelled of her own specific mortality. I held her hand and felt her fingers tightening around my hand, her grip going fierce. It confused me for a moment: there had always been an element of sheer strength in her most unguarded moments. When she loved you most deeply she didn’t melt in your arms but grabbed you so tightly your breath broke in half like an icy twig. And feeling those fingers pressing into me made me look into her eyes with a question in mine. Her eyes seemed not really to be looking at me, or at least not searching for anything in my face; they, instead, merely presented themselves and invited me to know them. And I did see what she wanted me to: she had changed. Suffering and secrecy, assignations, too many nights alone, missed meals, broken sleep, and the inevitable and irreversible lack of concern for her own self, her own privileges, her own comforts, all that excess baggage that had to be tossed over if the vessel was going to make it through the turbulent waters—good God, I suddenly felt unequal to the task of gazing so boldly upon her.

“How did you get in here?” I asked.

“It’s not as hard as they think it is. Anyhow, I’ve always looked like a secretary.”

“You don’t look like a secretary,” I said.

She pursed her lips, colored slightly. “Oh, I know what I look like,” she said. “There’s nothing to do about it.” She smiled. Her teeth; it was the graying, broken smile of a poor woman.

We heard footsteps from the corridor and the cheerful tuneless whistle of an armed man, accompanied by the jingle of keys. Sarah put up her hand to silence me, as if I might do something stupid. This was between her and them and I was instantly reduced to a civilian observer. I indicated with my thumb that we ought to step away from the door and go into my private office further in. And the act of walking, the feel of the floor beneath my shoes, the sight of the suddenly familiar things, brought me closer to my everyday self so by the time we were in my office and I was leaning against my desk I could face her and say, “Did you have to do it this way?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” She had unbuttoned her black wool coat and beneath it she wore a slightly dingy white blouse with a high lacy collar, such as one of her sisters might wear. She was very thin now; she seemed to have no breasts at all.

“Why? I think I deserved better than that. We were
lovers
.”

“It wasn’t about you and it wasn’t about me, Fielding,” she said.

“It could have been.” In all honesty, I don’t think even then I knew exactly what I meant by that, but saying it nonetheless ignited within me one of those wildfires that burn so deeply when we feel we have been
wronged
. My lips trembled and I wanted to turn away from her— yet I wanted, also, for her to have to witness my agony.

“It seemed to me,” she said, in a perfectly level voice, a voice over which she had so much control that she could even shade in a touch of pity, “that we took it as far as we could.”

“I don’t think that. I don’t think that at all. You tore my life in half.”

“No, I didn’t. You’re just saying that because you think you have to. Look at you. Look what you’ve done with your life.”

“You despise it.”

“Of course I don’t. I’m so proud of you. You did what you set out to do. You know how rare that is? I didn’t tear your life in half, Fielding. Perhaps I tore mine, though.”

“Then we’ll put it back together,” I said, turning on a dime from emptiness to utter hope, like a child can.