The Judas Glass Read online

  She said, “You know I would kill to keep you, Richard. If you needed a kidney or a lung out of my body, it would be yours. You know that.”

  This gave me no joy. She might give me a kidney, but I would pay an impossible price for it. Yet this was what I had loved about Connie, once. This liveliness, this shallow expectation that she could pretend the past had never happened, that the present wasn’t the way it really was, had won me. She had a grip on life.

  I tried to convince myself that what I felt was respect, companionship bordering on a fraternal regard. So it was a kind of love. But I didn’t lie, and I didn’t say anything further to cause her pain. I couldn’t tell her that although I still felt a stony affection for her, now I knew what love was. Tomorrow morning I would tell her I was leaving her, and then I would make plans to move my things out. Maybe it would not be so difficult. Maybe I should tell her now.

  But I felt sorry for her. Her breath was slow, even. She was asleep. There was a creaking, squeaking persistence from a distant corner of the house, Larkin in his exercise wheel. I could not interrupt her slumber. I couldn’t shake her awake to tell her that I was going.

  There were extra suitcases in the attic. I would pack those.

  I told myself I couldn’t sleep, but I did, skimming in and out of dreams, checking the digital clock on the nightstand as though it helped to know how much longer it would be until daylight. I lay on top of the blankets, sharing the bed with Connie out of habit, but not really in bed with her. We had slept like this many times before.

  The light, when it came, was dull gray. I looked perky in the mirror, my appearance a lie. I have always been fascinated by mirrors. My first science project was on the history of the looking glass, polished tin Egyptian mirrors, all the way down to the refracting telescope on Mount Palomar. Family lore explained my collison with the mirror by emphasizing my fondness for looking at myself. He thought it was a room with a cute little boy, and ran right into it. The right hand that lifts the comb to the hair is the left hand of the Other. A book held up to a looking glass shows each letter reversed, the sequence of symbols from right to left, but the order of the lines, from top to bottom, is not changed. The world is answered with an image so faithful it is unintelligible.

  I was putting on a new shirt with labels still attached, telling me that my garment was “born of unequalled quality.” The label was wound around a button, and I had to use a pair of toenail scissors to cut the string. I tucked the shirttail into my trousers as the phone rang.

  It was a whisper, one of those sounds that carry harder than screams.

  4

  “There’s somebody here!” I could hear Rebecca turning to listen, her nightgown rustling, her breath a soft thunder into the receiver. “There’s someone in the house!”

  Call the police, I began to say. Why did you call me first, why didn’t you punch 911? I didn’t have to ask. I knew why—I knew in my heart how much I meant to her. But before I could tell her what to do the connection went dead.

  “What is it?” asked Connie, rising on one elbow. “Is it Dad?”

  “No, it’s a client.”

  “It’s not Dad?” she asked again, still half-asleep. Her father had suffered heart trouble a few years before, and a phone call at a strange hour made both of us fear bad news.

  “Some kind of emergency,” I said. I stabbed numbers into the phone, 911, that magic code. I got that one-two-three ascending tune the phone company plays when you have misdialed. I tried again and got it wrong once more, my fingers working so fast I pushed two numbers at once. “A client having trouble with a prowler.”

  “Which client?” Connie was asking. “Richard, tell me what’s happening.”

  “Nobody you know,” I said, steadying myself to try it again.

  “It’s too early for anything to go wrong,” said Connie. She knew better. There were phone calls at odd hours. Once a landslide took a just-finished house halfway down a hill while my client rode the floor screaming, pulling on his pants. An attempted suicide in the midst of an eviction process, an ex-wife who wouldn’t vacant the Stinson Beach weekend retreat—there were emergencies even in my prosaic practice.

  I did it carefully this time, a stiff-fingered caricature of a man making sure he got it right. The phone company took its time.

  And then there was that electronic staccato chime, the sound of a phone ringing. The phone was ringing beside a dispatcher’s elbow, as though this was just an average call to see if the car was tuned yet or to see if someone’s secretary could rearrange that meeting. The phone was ringing and I was standing there with my eyes shut tight.

  But just as I sank into the chair in disbelief one of those efficient voices was there, one of those bored voices you know has answered thousands of emergencies. And I realized it was all in my mind, that the wait had not really been so long after all, the problem was being handled, there was a city out there, services.

  I told him the address, cross street College Avenue, a big brown-shingle house. With wisteria on a trellis. I saw the house in my mind, green garden hose looping across the front lawn. The dispatcher said the incident had already been reported, making an effort to soften his voice, to sound reassuring.

  “Who is it?” Connie was asking. “Richard, all you have to do is give me a name. If it’s a client, the client has a name.”

  I scrambled down the stairs. “Richard, I don’t like this,” Connie was saying from the bedroom, and I could picture her staring straight ahead, listening to the front door as it shut.

  The Mercedes wouldn’t start. And when it did I couldn’t see very well, the windshield covered with blisters of dew. The windshield wipers only made it worse. I was halfway down the street before I realized what I was doing to my life. I was deciding. There would be no returning to Connie.

  Driving cleared the windshield. There was no doubt in my mind. Rebecca was caught up in one of those too-common felonies, breaking and entering, and I could not hide a thought from myself. Maybe assault. Maybe rape. I ran a red light on The Alameda. I ran another on Cedar, and almost hit a jogger in a baggy white sweatshirt plodding methodically up the middle of the street.

  It was a blessing. I told myself how lucky I was. I could see how much Rebecca meant to me. The air was milky white, half smog, half spring haze. A man in a large brown overcoat rummaged through the trash at Shattuck and University, and litter had been strewn across the street, paper hamburger cartons and wads of pink and silver aluminum, the sort of colors I associate with Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve. Plywood had been nailed over one storefront, particle board over another. Two dogs frolicked past a mountain of sodden newspaper. The sidewalk glittered with broken glass, someone’s recycling gone awry.

  My tires squealed and I prayed as I sent mental messages. I’m coming, Rebecca, and everything will be different. It isn’t just a man coming, another unfaithful husband, a man duplicitous by habit and profession. This was a new day on its way, a break with the past. Nothing would be the same.

  I saw the smoke from two blocks away, billowing over the rooftops. The smoke shouldered upward and flattened in the morning light, plowed eastward by the breeze.

  It has nothing to do with her. There was a time when smoke was the sign of village life, of industry. Only in the contemporary imagination is so much smoke necessarily sinister. I was scaring myself. Everything would be okay.

  I nearly rear-ended an old Toyota, its red finish faded to pink, that made its way up Derby Street delivering newspapers. I laughed at myself, a soundless, stiff-lipped chuckle. I was never calm in a crisis. I didn’t actually panic, I just quietly disintegrated. I leaned on my horn to clear a quartet of cyclists heading toward the smoke. One of them turned his head to look at me before giving way with a look of intelligent incredulity.

  Lime green fire engines were parked with the authority of freight cars, blocking the street. I braked the car, and then was in the street, running toward her house. It was all changed, unfamilia
r, the wisteria and its trellis gone, the roof alive. Water was spearing the flames as I arrived, and sirens were still approaching from the distance.

  I was on the lawn when a bulky figure stepped in front of me, walking backward as fast as he could. He was a big man in a fireman’s coat trimmed with strips of day-glo green. He said the yard was off-limits, and tried to straight-arm me. “You have to go back to the curb.”

  As I brushed past him, he tackled me, almost knocking me down. The fireman and I struggled, his sheer bulk and animal power bearing me to the wet grass.

  He was strong, and he wrestled me into a gym-class hold, a position I remembered from a lecture in how arrest warrants were served. I suffered a few moments of pain compliance, and then the wind slackened and the smoke drifted our way.

  The smoke tasted poisonous. A house does not burn with the thick, stifling purity of grass. It has a bitter stink, furniture and wiring and in this case something else, the metallic tang of gasoline.

  “Mr. Stirling,” gasped the fireman. I was a little surprised he knew my name, but my face was often in the news, defending tenants against landlords and speculators.

  As soon as he said my name I had some power over him. Not much, but a little handhold, a tiny bit of leverage. “She’s in there,” I said.

  Another man might have used the momentary lapse in his grip to spring free. But I knew that my best plan was to talk, to explain that Rebecca had called me, that there had been a prowler, and that I believed she was still trapped. I kept talking as I got to my feet, and when I saw my chance I ran.

  He had me again, but only for an instant. The big man called for help. I broke free, rolling, twisting. It was difficult, the stronger men clinging to me as I screamed her name.

  The windows were darker recesses in the flame. The heat warped the air, sending me reeling involuntarily backward. I waded forward against the naked power of the heat.

  5

  I would breathe, I told myself, but just once. Just one deep breath.

  That single breath filled my lungs with poison. I could not hold it. I coughed painfully, calling her name. I clawed the floor, digging forward on my elbows and knees. I groped and found the sofa. The coffee table was on its side, and I felt something plump and soft, a pillow.

  There was a sizzling sound from the recesses of the house, her record collection, the shellac seventy-eights frying, the quilt smoke by now, the piano a flaming altar. I was breathing her possessions, inhaling and exhaling what was left of her. I gagged, bawling her name, and dragged myself forward.

  The bedroom was gone, fire, terrible heat. I fought my way to the kitchen, the linoleum blistering. I thought I heard her voice. I couldn’t be mistaken—it was her.

  Finding the stove helped me—I knew where I was. I knocked something over, a clattering mop, and an electric cord caught me as I crawled. Something fell, a coffee maker, a blender.

  I knew where I would find her, where she would go if she was hurt. And she was. She was sprawled on the bathroom floor. Blood splashed around me. The smoke was not as bad there, and she lay beside the bathtub, the water running, the slop of blood and lukewarm water pooling, the drain plugged by a washcloth.

  She did not open her eyes. Her hands were ice. I could not stand to see what he had done to her. A human voice kept repeating the single word No.

  I dragged her, the flames thundering, the low ceiling of smoke pressing me to the floor. No. My voice, the only word left to me. And the thought came to me, with the resonance of a tune I had finally recalled, something with the sweetness of a childhood memory. I might as well stay here.

  I might as well die with her.

  When help arrived, goggles and a gas mask bending over the two of us, it could have been a hallucination brought on by the venom in the air. It could have been an apparition boiled up from the rupture of my own synapses as I sprawled there. The smoke cleared with the blast from a fire extinguisher.

  A cup was pressed over my mouth.

  I shook my head, hard. But the hand pressed all the harder. “Breathe!” said a voice.

  There was the bleary impression of daylight, emergency lights flashing, the engines of the firetrucks rumbling, people in the distance. I turned on the wet lawn and Rebecca was there, but I could only see one hand thrust out between the bodies that knelt over her.

  I almost didn’t recognize her nightgown, the flimsy cotton soaked with blood. I wanted to hide her near-nakedness from these earnest strangers as they strapped her into a stretcher. I wanted to shield her from the eyes of spectators, neighbors in clothes thrown on over pajamas, joggers, eyes hopeful and afraid, and fascinated.

  I found myself standing, facing the growing crowd. I was soil, dirt, ash, and sweat, standing there in the morning sun. At my feet was the garden hose. The firefighters had trampled the lawn and pressed the green coil deep into the turf.

  “You’ll want to go with us to the hospital,” said the fireman. He held no grudge against me for the struggle. His eyes were compassionate, and I was surprised again at how men and women used to calamity can still express kindness. This time he kept a good grip, arm around me.

  She was already in the rear of the ambulance, the paramedics not bothering to turn back to check on my condition. But that arm around me led me to the ambulance, pushing me forward, not for my sake, but for hers.

  Because we wanted to go fast. We wanted to hurry. Speed would do the job. That’s all we needed. Haste, and all would be well.

  The ambulance had to swing around a car parked in the street. My car, I thought dully. My own car is in the way.

  The siren was on, although in the morning sun there was no sense of flashing lights, no sense that we were clearing the street ahead of us of traffic. I found the sound of the siren exciting and reassuring in a disconnected, boyish way.

  I took her hand, outthrust again between the bodies of the people working over her. A syringe plunged into her chest. I held her hand and looked out at the receding image of parked cars, cars easing back into the flow of traffic.

  6

  The frenzied protocol of the Emergency Room left me thrust to one side with a yellow tank of oxygen. I kept a mask cupped to my face for a moment or two, the cool air flavored with rubber and something undefinable, like breeze off a snow bank. Then I let the mask fall away. What happened before me was in bright segments, inhuman technological events, injections, muttered commands.

  This was how they save you, I told Rebecca in my mind. This is you, back from wherever you are hiding. See how many people want you to live. It was a mandate, a verdict. Everyone who thinks Rebecca should live raise your hand. So many hands, so much glistening scarlet.

  When I was a boy my father had been cheerful about medical facts, sometimes inappropriately so. When a foundry exploded in Emeryville, my father removed sixty-four steel fragments from the abdominal cavity of the plant foreman. When I asked, my father made his wry smile and said that of course his patient lived. But the foreman died a few months later, in a car accident. This was life to my father, triumph and disaster decorated with the Christmas-tree ornaments of a surgeon’s self-esteem.

  When blood is exposed to air it changes into a gel. Calcium and blood proteins, aided by adrenalin, change from water to clay. Look at all those, my father would say, scooting off the metal chair, away from the microscope so I could see the metropolis of flying saucers, red blood cells.

  “What we need are next of kin,” said a voice, a cop, a man I knew.

  He gave me a few seconds but I could not think.

  “Parents, siblings,” he prompted.

  “Pennant,” I said. I had never considered what a jaunty name it was. Her surname sounded disembodied, the entire conversation having the rude crispness of a search warrant, the residence and curtilage of Rebecca Mary Pennant, her womb, her flesh. Some of the semen was mine, I wanted to say. Some of it was my own act of love still living inside her.

  Her brother looked nothing like her, short, slender, much
younger. Her parents were compact, weathered people in well-pressed, simple clothes, graceful as she was—as she had been. They wore glasses. All three of them. I could not help noticing this, or noticing the way her brother did not meet my eyes while her mother took both my hands.

  “Thank you so much for everything,” said her mother. “She used to say she had a new friend.” I recognized the giddy emotional state, a woman not knowing how to behave now that so much of her life was gone.

  “Don’t go in,” I said. I turned to her brother. “You should go in first.” Go in first and make sure they have covered her, make sure they have washed away some of the blood. He wore glasses that were ardently unstylish, owlish, round.

  “Yes, Simon, you go in,” Rebecca’s mother was saying.

  Simon looked up at me and I could see how much he resembled her after all, the way he was considering before he said anything, the way he saw something in me I was not aware of myself, some reason to trust me.

  Her father had a small gray mustache. “What do you know?” he asked. “Tell us.”

  I couldn’t tell him.

  “I want to hear what happened, Richard. I want an explanation.” He had a slight Scottish accent, and seemed both brisk and badly shaken.

  He was ready to blame me, if only because I was the messenger. Neither parent really understood. Her father was abruptly inquisitive, her mother sweetly vague. But neither of them could accept what was happening. And maybe they were right. Maybe the force of disbelief would work a miracle.

  I turned to her brother and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go in with you,” I said.

  Afterward we came out into the corridor again. Simon put his arms around his mother, not saying anything. She whispered something and he nodded, and I could not bear to see the expression in her eyes. Her father stood apart, a wiry man leaning into a breeze, but there was no wind in the corridor, only what was happening.