Flesh Wounds, page 17
“Home?” Carolyn made it sound like a foreign country. “When does she... have to go back?”
“She doesn’t,” David replied bluntly, immediately regretting it because Carolyn had been their friend for over ten years, ever since her husband had died in an industrial accident and she’d been forced to sell her home and take the apartment across the courtyard. David put P.D. down and took her hands. “Carolyn, there’s nothing more they can do.” Watching as her eyes filled with tears, it all came rushing in on him. After thirty-seven years of Maggie’s voice being the last thing he heard every night and the first thing he heard every morning, she’d be gone. After all those years watching her cook in this very kitchen, watching her climb those stairs to the bedroom, watching her sew in front of the television in the living room, she’d be gone. Just like that. Gone. The apartment would echo hollowly without her. He’d be all alone. Worse than alone, for he’d be alone with the memories of when he hadn’t been alone.
“Maggie’s come home,” he whispered hoarsely, “to die.”
And then he was sobbing on her shoulder, crying like a baby while she cried too. She stroked his back and told him it would be all right, but of course it wouldn’t.
After Carolyn left, David ate his sandwich while watching the evening news. War and murder. Drive-by shootings and gang violence. Another corrupt politician and another bomb threat. Maybe checking out altogether was the right idea. Switching off the television, he was confronted by his own reflection in the black screen. He was surprised by how skeletal his visage had become. As if it were contagious, he’d acquired Maggie’s wasted appearance.
The skeleton, he knew, was a long standing symbol of death. With the erosion of time, the skeleton reveals itself. Death sullies forth. We carry death inside us, he thought. Death is ensconced in the body, lurking in our bones and tissues, becoming more and more apparent every day. As Plato proposed a suprasensible essence behind the surface of things in this world, so death would lie hidden somewhere behind the epidermis. Death underlies life, and time’s purpose is to peel successive layers so as to render it ever more visible.
When exactly do we begin dying? At birth? In that case, life was a series of partial destructions strewn along the road of individual existence, culminating eventually in total destruction. It was a depressing line of thought, even in his present state of mind, but somewhere within him there was an evil chuckle that said it was all true. He tried to convince himself otherwise. If life is a series of little deaths, he reasoned, then the final death would hold no terror for anyone.
His sandwich was bland. When he offered it to P.D. and the finicky Schnauzer ate it without hesitation, he knew it was his taste buds and not the sandwich’s flavor that had gone on hiatus. He gave the dog water and let him out in the yard. As the dog began making his rounds, David was unexpectedly overcome by a memory: “What’ll we name him?” he’d asked Maggie after several days of calling him nothing but Puppy Dog.
“I don’t know,” she’d said. “What was the name of that funny dog on The Little Rascals?”
“Petey?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Petey. Let’s call him P.D. Pee. Dee. The letters. Only say it like The Little Rascals’ Petey. P.D.—short for Puppy Dog.”
That was Maggie: creative. Nothing ever had one meaning with Maggie. She saw beyond the obvious, insisted on depth and originality in everything they did, even naming a stupid dog. If you asked her what color the sky was, you could expect anything but blue for an answer. She had the most incredible way of seeing every side of an argument. She was the only person he’d ever met who could disagree with someone by first admitting that they were right.
While P.D. was outside, David warmed up some soup in the microwave. Afterward, he locked up the house, gave P.D. a dog biscuit, and climbed the stairs, hitting light switches as he went. Maggie was still asleep, her breathing shallow and irregular. Because he hated to wake her—she’d gotten so little sleep in the hospital, what with all their needles and intrusive tests—he set the soup on the nightstand and got ready for bed himself. It wasn’t until he was crawling into bed beside her that she awoke.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“That’s alright.”
“Are you hungry?”
She glanced at the soup with obvious disinterest. “No. Just tired. I feel like I could sleep forever.” A shiver crept up his spine at those words and Maggie saw his reaction. “Sorry.” She reached out and touched his face. “Thank you for bringing me home, darling.”
He shrugged. “This is where you belong.”
A slight nod. “I couldn’t stand another day of having those nurses waiting on me. You know how I hate having others in charge of me.”
David kissed her on the cheek. “I know, sweetheart.”
“At least the cancer won’t outlive me. If nothing else, it’s murdered itself.”
He was quiet, as always at a loss for words when their conversation became dark and the subject was her dying. Silence reigned for several minutes. Because silence was what he had to look forward to and what he feared most, he felt compelled to break it, to hear her voice while there was still time. “Carolyn was here earlier.”
“P.D.?”
“Downstairs, eating his biscuit.”
“He likes those new barbecue ones.”
“I know.”
“I’m glad I missed Carolyn. Her first words would have been, ‘How are you?’” Maggie rubbed at her eyes. They were already red and rheumy, worse when she was done. “God, what a thoughtless question. There’s no acceptable answer to it, Davey. I can either tell her I’m fine, which is a lie, or I can tell her I’m dying, which is as brutal and unnecessary as it is true.”
“Maggie—”
“It’s as bad as the nurses calling out ‘Good morning!’ and throwing open the blinds every damn morning. They’re just checking to see if I’m still alive. Carolyn, though she means well, is doing the same thing by stopping over. If she comes back in the morning, tell her I’m sleeping, Davey. I mean it. I don’t want to see anyone. I’d really rather just be alone.”
He wondered momentarily whether that included him.
“I can understand why elephants have a special, secret place for this.”
He shuddered again.
Maggie took his hand. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I? You’ll remember me as a bitch if I’m not careful.”
“Nonsense.” He kissed the back of her hand. “Are you... are you in any pain?”
“No,” she assured him, and then added darkly: “I think the cancer has mercifully eaten away my pain centers. I don’t feel a thing.”
He thought it more likely that the morphine shot they’d given her before she left the hospital was still doing its job. He made a mental note to check her again in a few hours. The hospital had given him codeine tablets for her to take when the pain set in. They’d also told him he could call the paramedics for additional morphine shots if the codeine wasn’t effective. Relieving the pain was the only thing they could do for her now.
“I’m just incredibly—” She yawned. “—tired.”
He kissed her again. “Sleep then, my Maggie May. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
A sweet smile. “I know you will, Davey. Do you think maybe you could hold me though?”
He took her in his arms and she dropped off immediately. Though he was exhausted himself, sleep eluded him for some time. He contented himself by watching her sleep, feeling the warmth of her against him, the rhythmic movement of her breathing, the weight of her on the mattress beside him. He tried not to think about a time when it would not be so. The moon looked through the bedroom window and bathed her thin, haggard face in angelic light. P.D. came up the stairs and took up his usual spot on the foot of the bed. In time, David fell asleep.
There was no noise, no commotion, no tinkling of broken glass or the sharp crack of a forced lock to wake him. There was just a sudden overwhelming fear. A sense of wrongness. A foreboding presence that manifested itself in the fabric of his sleep and brought him screaming from the bed.
From their bedroom it was possible to look down over a wrought iron railing to the stairway landing and the living room below. Leaning out, David strained at the darkness, trying to determine what, if anything, had invaded his home and set his heart to racing so. The moon was pouring in the landing window and the stairway should have been well lit, but it wasn’t. The stairwell was a black pool, inky deep and impenetrable. There was a thick, visible texture to the penumbra at the base of the stairs. As David strained to penetrate its nebulous core, he saw it was slowly, silently advancing.
He realized—no, sensed—that it was evil. More than evil. It surpassed evil. More than just the absence of good, this was an end to all things.
“Go away!” he screamed.
The shadows lengthened, stretching up the stairs in tendrils which swapped grey reality for black empty. It seemed now that he could see shifting silhouettes in the midst of the black: elongated, distorted limbs; clawed hands; gaping mouths and eyes darker than the surrounding gloom.
In the stand by the bed was his thirty-eight caliber revolver. He aimed down the stairway, shivering despite the warm summer night and the apartment’s inadequate air conditioning. The barrel wavered uncontrollably, but by this time the darkness had spread, floor to ceiling, halfway up the stairs. There was no way he could miss it.
“Get out of here!” he shouted. “I’ll shoot. I swear I will!”
The darkness advanced.
The roar of the gun was deafening. “Go away!” David screamed. As the presence continued to ooze up the stairs, he emptied the revolver. The flash from the muzzle lit the landing below, but failed to penetrate the intangible barrier coming up the stairs.
And then he was awake, sitting up in the bed, the sheets clinging to him with cold sweat. The soup he’d left on the night stand had been overturned. It was on his arm and dripping softly over the sides of the stand and into the carpet. Otherwise, everything was quiet and normal. The room was still lit by a brilliant, full moon. Though the recognizable shapes of his furniture were muted by darkness and the monochrome night, he could see everything—and everything appeared to be in order.
Careful not to wake Maggie, he slipped from the bed and peered cautiously down the stairs. The stairwell was empty. So, too, the stretch of living room at the base of the stairs. Nothing had invaded his home. The thirty-eight was still in the drawer by the bed, untouched and certainly unfired.
He’d had a bad dream. That was all. A nightmare. Everyone had them. And yet...
Death had come for Maggie.
He got a towel from the bathroom and wiped the sweat from his face. It wasn’t until he was using the same towel to mop up the soup that he realized P.D. was missing.
Life advances by burying things. Dead things. Unwanted things. Debris, detritus, flotsam and jetsam. The things we cast off for one reason or another. The things we can’t take with us.
When he was thirty-five, David buried his writing career, taking the three novels that he’d written, but couldn’t sell, and burning them, a page at a time. He settled into tenure and committed himself to teaching other young hopefuls the beauty of English composition. None of them asked, What have you published, Mr. Hunter? If you profess this mastery of language, why haven’t you used it? They were focused on their own futures and cared little about the greying man who might have been someone if only he’d found the proper voice. If only he’d found the right editor, the right publisher, the right agent. If only he’d had the money to write full time. If only he’d written the type of novel the public wanted to read, instead of the type of novel he had wanted to write. If only his manuscripts hadn’t been buried beneath so many others.
Maggie had buried her dreams too. She’d buried the money they’d saved for her medical education in a vain attempt to get their son out of a Chilean prison. He swore the drugs weren’t his, that he’d never seen them before, but the authorities had their own evidence and weren’t inclined to believe him. It didn’t matter whether David and Maggie believed him. It only mattered that he was their only son. In the end, all the bribes, all the political contributions (And weren’t those the same thing?), had amounted to nothing. And when the day came when the embassy called and told them their son had died of pneumonia in prison, they buried him too. The money they’d saved was gone—and even if it hadn’t been, Maggie’s heart was no longer in it. So she settled on being an Emergency Medical Technician, which sounded exciting and important, but was in reality the grunt position of the emergency room. She emptied bed pans. She mopped blood and brains from the floor. She cleaned urine and feces from the bodies of the insane, the senile, and the just plain ugly. She buried her future in hours of drudgery.
When nineteen-year-old Christie Claremont sued David for an A in English Lit, they lost the house and were forced to take up residence in an old apartment complex where the only good thing was Carolyn across the courtyard. Okay, so the Claremont bitch had really sued him for sexual harassment, but he was innocent. He knew that. And maybe Maggie did too, but a piece of the trust that lay between them, however small a piece it may have been, was buried on the day the court ordered them to pay. They might have made it out of the red, but then Maggie got sick and was eventually forced to quit her job.
We bury these things and we move on. We try our best not to look back because going back and fixing them isn’t an option. There is only forward—where there’ll be still more things to bury. They’re obligations and responsibilities that can’t be shirked, these dreams we’ve yet to lose. We do our duty and we bury them and we try to forget, but Death has both a standing appointment and a sense of humor. When he comes, he digs them up, torments us with their recollection while he’s reminding us that we’re only human and he is perhaps the only immortal.
When he comes, he never leaves empty-handed.
That morning, before the sun was quite up, before the apartment complex became a buzz of activity as people left for work, David Hunter buried his dog in the small wooded field separating them from the interstate.
Maggie ate some dry toast and a few mouthfuls of oatmeal with cinnamon. She was noticeably weaker and her color had gotten worse. Her skin had taken on an ashen grey hue that reminded David of an impending storm. Not the violent, lightning and thunder kind, but a storm that would drizzle softly, dying out sometime late afternoon with no one even noticing it had ended though they’d complained all day long about the rain.
The pain set in after she ate. Or maybe, as he really suspected, she woke up with it and suffered as long she could before she told him. He tanked her up on codeine, doubling the maximum recommended dosage because it really didn’t matter if she became addicted. The pain subsided after about twenty minutes, but there was a stiffness to her jawline, a clenching of the teeth and a haunted look in her eyes that told him the pain wasn’t completely gone.
She slept some more. He cleaned up the kitchen, climbing the stairs every so often to check on her. He called the university and spoke briefly with the grad student covering his classes. He watched television. He tried, but couldn’t get her to eat anything for lunch. He paced. He watched out the window as kids on summer vacation ramped their bicycles over an old sheet of plywood set on some bricks. He picked some roses from one of Carolyn’s bushes and left them beside the bed for Maggie. He vacuumed the living room floor. He dusted Maggie’s collection of crystal elephants. He took out the trash, throwing in P.D.’s water bowl.
He tried not to think.
About.
Anything.
In this manner, the day slipped by. It took a lifetime.
In our dreams, we touch other worlds.
We can touch Heaven and Hell. People and places and times we’ve lost or never even known. We can fly. We can breathe underwater. We can touch the face of God and stand toe to toe with Death. In our dreams we can reach from here to there on some metaphysical level where the ethereal boundaries of the subconscious and the subliminal replace those of physical reality.
We don’t always know or remember where we’ve been or what we’ve done. The subconscious has selective amnesia built in as a defense mechanism for the mind. Without it, if we always remembered the places we’d touched in our sleep, many of us would go insane.
David knew what he had done.
Death had come to claim its own and David had met and withstood the Grim Reaper in some alternate dimension where dream and reality collide. Petulant, ever the sore loser, Death had taken P.D. instead.
There was no other explanation. The dog was still young, barely five years old, and in perfect health. There’d been no obvious injury or sign of illness. His heart had simply stopped beating. David had known as soon as he saw P.D. was missing from the foot of the bed. Finding P.D.’s cold, limp body on the living room floor had merely confirmed it.
In our dreams we touch upon that place from whence comes Death. Perhaps, we even touch Death itself. Who’s to say how close we come to dying each and every night we lay down to sleep? Our hearts slow down. Our breathing becomes shallow and insouciant. David was reminded of an Ingmar Bergman film, Wild Strawberries, in which death is portrayed as sleep. The movie’s last scene shows the protagonist in a deep sleep and everything seems to slow down. There was also a French poet, whose name he could not remember, who had said, “Dormir, c’estessayer lamort..” To sleep is to try on death.
When we sleep, our minds reach out in an effort to find some focus, some temporary distraction for those hours in which the body, which must shut down and regenerate, is an inattentive suitor. And if in that quest for amusement, we happen to stumble in the path of Death on his errands, who’s to say we can’t sidetrack him? Lacking a physical presence, it is, after all, just a contest of wills.
While many people would have had trouble believing that they had confronted Death, David did not. Because of what he stood to lose, he had no choice but to believe. With Maggie’s life at stake, he couldn’t help but desire a repeat encounter.
