A Sense of Shadow (v1.0), page 5
Conrad slumped back in his chair. “I guess I heard it too,” he said. “I thought a tree had blown down. You can turn on the living room lamp from up there, by the way.”
They both looked at me again. Hugh said, “Okay, you saw the light and you went to have a look. What then?’’
I tried to remember, but it was confused. I remembered how moist and warm the potting soil was. “There was a crash, something breaking, and I realized it was something up on the balcony. I started to run up there. I don’t know why. I think I yelled. And then you came in. I can’t remember anything else.” I found myself looking at my hands again.
“Why did you start repotting that thing?” Hugh asked gently.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. It seemed such an evil thing, so cruel. I was mad and afraid…”
“You want more coffee?” Conrad asked, and now he was using the other voice, the dead voice that concealed him.
“She needs it,” Hugh said. “Regina, your hands are all right. The dirt’s gone.”
I had been staring at them. I put them in my lap, but I could feel the dirt under my nails, under my ring. Conrad poured more coffee and sat down again.
“Drink it,” Hugh said after a moment. I lifted the cup and sipped. “Don’t you want cream?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What’s the matter with her?” Conrad asked. I looked at him. He was studying my face.
“I think you’d better call Lucas,” Hugh said. He took the cup from my hands, added cream, and gave it back to me. “Drink it,” he said gently.
I had forgotten that Conrad was getting Lucas out of bed, and when they both entered the breakfast room, I thought it was morning, breakfast time. I didn’t want Lucas to see my dirty hands, my dirty robe.
“Honey, what’s wrong? What happened?” Lucas held my shoulders and examined my face, exactly the way Conrad had looked at me.
I started to tell him what I had told Hugh and Conrad, beginning at the same point, waking up to hear the wind, getting up, coming downstairs…
“I think we’d better call the doctor,” Conrad said, breaking in.
“I agree,” Hugh said. “You want to call? And then maybe we should have a look around.”
Part Two
October 17, Continued
“Regina is in a state of shock, not screaming or fainting or anything dramatic; it is rather as if she has gone cataleptic. She agrees to any suggestion without hesitation. Say talk and she talks; say sit down and she sits. Sizemore gave her a tranquilizer that was worthless; she is already tranquil. She is so pliant she has become like a rubber doll.
“I took her and Lucas to my house and left them there. Obviously she can’t stay in the big house any longer.”
Hugh Froelich turned off the tape recorder and stared at the notebook on his desk. He had made copies of the pages she had written since her arrival, had read them over twice, and he felt a sense of uneasiness that was almost physical, as if a cold were coming on, or something he had eaten had turned out to be poisonous.
“There is no mechanism for it,” he said bitterly, with his finger on the record button, but not pushing it down. Hysteria could take many forms, he thought clearly. People don’t have to have functional blindness, or paralysis, or anything overt. They can become docile and childlike, putty-like. He slammed his hand against the desktop in frustration. She was a pretty, healthy young woman, good features, good body. She was self-confident, self-contained, quiet, observant, smart, probably good at her job, efficient. Too thin, but he could not tell if that was the result of a deliberate diet, or heredity, or circumstances of the present. She was not the type, he thought again, to become hysterical. Finding that mess in the plant room should not have induced anything more than a mild shock, a transitory shock. And nothing more than that could have happened. She had interrupted someone in a destructive act, nothing more. There was no mechanism for anything more.
Grimly he read through the notebook again and then snapped it shut. She had written that no one had attended the funeral, but at least a hundred people had been there. Called as hastily as it had been, still a hundred people had shown up. Why had she written otherwise? And later, telling what happened, she said that the living room light had been on. He knew that was wrong; he had switched on the plant room light himself and before then everything had been dark. Not too dark for anyone whose eyes had adjusted, but not light either. She had not seen the living room light on, or else she had turned it off herself. He did not believe that, neither did he believe that she had run through the dark living room, up dark stairs, to repot the flowers, also in the dark. Someone else turned off the light, then. And she didn’t notice?
He put the notebook and his copies into his briefcase and stalked from his office in the psych building without seeing anyone in the halls or on the stairs or in the parking lot. Normally he walked back and forth from his house to work and he was unfamiliar with the parking lot. He thought it unnecessarily jammed, but he liked the shade trees throughout it. Every year there was a battle over whether to cut the trees down to provide a few more parking spaces. He suspected that it was a rigged fight, staged only to still the protests over the inevitable parking crunch.
His house was on a small side street lined with horse chestnut trees that met overhead. They were not bare yet, although the ground was inches deep with leaves. Signs of autumn were everywhere, but still the pleasant weather held. His grass would need one last mowing, he thought, striding past it, forgetting it again. He had put off repainting the porch until now it was almost too late in the year to attend to it; if the weather changed, paint would take forever to dry and until then it would accumulate dust, twigs, whatever junk was in the air. He had his key out, but he hesitated and rang the bell instead. He had turned the house over to Regina and Lucas for as long as they wanted and for the duration his house was their house, their house his. Povertyville, he thought, after the big house they had left. Lucas finally opened the door.
“Any change?”
Lucas shook his head. “I think she*s sleeping now. She was dozing a while ago. Mallory’s on his way in.”
Hugh nodded. “Mind if I make coffee?”
Lucas looked uncomfortable. “We probably will go to a hotel.”
“She’ll be better off here. I just thought Mallory might like a cup of coffee when he arrives.” He didn’t wait for a response, but went to the kitchen and busied himself grinding coffee, measuring water. Lucas followed miserably; he looked as if he should be sleeping too. He had been ill very recently, Hugh remembered, wondering if his recovery had been complete, if he was still convalescing. He didn’t look well. And now he had to decide what to do next. Stay here with his wife or go back to the house and play a dead man’s macabre game.
Mallory arrived before the coffee was ready. He looked angry and mean. Without preliminary he said to Lucas, “Now are you willing to get the hell out of here, go back home?”
“I can’t,” Lucas mumbled.
“You can. I called the airline. They’re holding reservations for you.”
“What about you?”
“When you’re on that plane, I’m heading back home. And I’m getting another opinion about that goddam will. I intend to fight it all the way.”
“Give everything to Conrad and Janet. They won’t leave.”
“You know damn well no one’s going to win!”
“I don’t even know for sure you’ll take off if we go. For all I know you want to stay and try for it yourself!”
Mallory bunched his hands until his knuckles showed white. He turned and stamped out. He slammed the door hard.
“You’re not taking her back there, are you?” Hugh asked.
Lucas gave him a dark look, as if he would like to resume trying to strangle him. “I’m hiring a nurse to come here and stay with her at night,” he said. “I’ll rent a car and come back later.” He went into the bedroom, and Hugh, after a regretful glance at the coffee, started for the door. It was a nice little house, for the first time too little. He wanted to talk with Regina again, but not with Lucas there in his present mood. He wondered if Lucas had ever fought with Mallory before, had ever crossed him in any way. He remembered the notebook, took it from his briefcase, and put it on an end table. He wanted to ask her to continue to write in it, but maybe she didn’t need any suggestion. It might even be better if he didn’t bring it up, not raise the question about possible copies. He didn’t want to have to deny that he had read it, or copied it, or anything else.
Driving back to the house he kept trying to apply his own advice to himself: You are not responsible for anyone else’s state of mind. Yes he was, he kept thinking. He had not been very good at counseling; he always got impatient because the problems students became suicidal over always seemed so solvable. Stop seeing him. Give her up. Study harder. Don’t smoke dope. One day his mentor, Dr. Fields, had said to him, stop counseling, and he had laughed out loud. So simple. He had been stewing about it for weeks, losing sleep, worrying before, during, and after every session. The one thing he always stressed with the students was: You are responsible for your actions, for your state of mental health as well as your physical health. And now that was going, just as almost everything he had ever believed in seemed to become smoke when he really needed it. He was responsible. Those people out there in that house, waiting, dreading something, nurturing anxiety, watching it grow, fighting with each other, they had become his responsibility. That girl with her empty smile and pliant manner, he was responsible for her too. And Lucas, pale as a ghost, haggard, worried out of his mind over her, tom between duty to her and…what? money? a need to prove something? Whatever it was, he was responsible for him. All of them.
Regina dozed, awakened, dozed again until late in the afternoon when she finally came wide awake. For a long time she could not remember where she was or why she was here. A double bed, a chest of drawers, a closet door slightly ajar…All so spartan and tidy. Where did he keep his junk? The things that just accumulated. Now she could hear the television dimly, and there was a coffee fragrance. She was very hungry. No one had given her breakfast or lunch, not even a snack, she thought aggrievedly. That damn doctor had given her a capsule, and Conrad and Janet had sat with her on the couch…She shook her head; it all faded after that and the memories were strange, like a faintly seen film of someone she had not been very interested in.
She got up and put on her robe and went out to find Lucas. He was sprawled in a low chair before the television. He leaped to his feet at her appearance.
“Honey! Are you okay?”
She nodded. “Hungry. What time is it?”
He told her three-thirty and she blinked. A whole day gone. Maybe that was the only way to get through the rest of them, using the little, magic time capsules.
“1*11 get you an egg and coffee and toast for now, and then you shower and dress and let’s take a walk into town,” Lucas said. “I’ll buy a sketch pad, maybe some pencils; we’ll rent a car and have a real dinner somewhere…Okay?”
She nodded, and for a moment she thought of the past week in New York. Their decision not to buy two pens at seventy-nine cents each. The way they always had to juggle sums like that. She was still paying off college loans, and he had gone into debt between jobs, just trying to stay alive. Such hardship back there, she thought bitterly, and such wealth out here. Her parents would have wanted to help, if they had known, but she had never told them. She knew they would have mortgaged their house to help her and she had lied to them about finances. And all the time his father had had so much.
She settled for coffee and toast. “Can we afford to pay for a car, dinner in town?” She glanced at the kitchen dubiously. “I could probably cook something.”
“Mallory advanced me some cash,” Lucas said. “Strohm said he’d put a check in a bank for us to use until the estate is settled.” He sat across the table from her and played with a spoon. “What happened?” he asked suddenly. “Back at the house. What happened to you?”
She put down her cup and shook her head. “I told you. I told everyone. I don’t know why I did anything. I don’t remember what I thought or what I felt. Just what I did.”
“But damn it! You had to think something! Why did you decide to go up there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Regina! For Christ’s sake! Did you hear anyone up there? Did you hear voices?”
“I told you! I don’t remember hearing anything but crashes. Leave me alone. I’m going to shower and get dressed.*’ She ran from the kitchen, and stood inside the bathroom with her back to the door, as if holding it shut. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and exhaled it very slowly. She must not think about it. When she found herself trying to remember, she could feel a blankness settling over her, like a shot of Novocain in her mind. Leave me alone, she said under her breath. Just leave me alone! And she knew she meant more than Lucas; she meant the house, his father, whatever else was there that she could not name. Leave me alone, she said over and over silently.
Hugh prowled the grounds all afternoon under a drizzly sky that looked low enough to touch. He stood outside the sunroom windows and looked in at the bed where Regina had seen him the last time. The fuchsias dripped and he could imagine the slugs sampling the air, welcoming the change in the weather, eager for darkness. He looked up at the plant room, then down the lava road toward the bridge, not visible from here, where Lucas had watched his mother crash and die. He could imagine the truck roaring through the fields, beating her to the bridge. The road had become dark red, as if the rain had changed to blood. He turned away angrily from his own thoughts and went back inside.
“Oregon,” Janet said, surveying him. “It’s come back.”
It had taken him a year to get used to the way people in Oregon walked around in the rain apparently without noticing it. No umbrellas, no hats, no scarfs. Not in the occasional hard rains, they were like other people then, but in the daily winter mist and drizzle and light rain that fell intermittently, or simply hung in the air, they acted as if the sun were shining, went about their business and got wet, or at least very moist. After that first year, he had found that he was doing exactly the same thing, out without an umbrella or hat because either would have been a waste of time and a burden and not very necessary. No one got very wet, but no one was entirely dry most of the winter either. His former wife never had got used to it. Such weather, she used to say, made a mockery out of the best hairdresser.
He ran his hands through his hair; just a little damp, but Janet was right, Oregon had come back after a long dry summer.
‘They’re having drinks in the television room whenever you want to join them,” Janet said, heading for the stairs.
“Thanks,” he said. As soon as she was out of sight on the staircase, he went instead to the living room. It looked naked without the greenery up there. The light looked different; he had become used to the green filter effect. Anita Mantessa had cleaned up everything and no plants remained. He remembered the night he had come to dinner four years ago. The first time he had seen Culbertson he had been up there, outlined against the windows, a trowel in one hand, a potted plant in the other. He had been a large man, big chested, broad, although his legs had been thin and a little short for his body. Not misshapen, but not classically proportioned either. His head had been large, made to appear even larger by his fluffy hair, which stood out in an aureole.
“Froelich, are you? Read your paper. Don’t believe in possession, eh? Neither do I. Neither do I,” he had said. There was an elevator chair on the rail; he rode it down, saying a slick salesman had talked him into trying it. A short while ago, thinking he might have had a stroke, he had become alarmed enough to have an EEG made. The problem had turned out to be an inner-ear infection caused by sinus trouble, he had said. Then he had touched Hugh’s chest and pushed slightly. “Don’t believe in coincidence, either, sir. One month after Sizemore had that thing made I read your article, and I thought, aha, that’s why I had it done. Funny, don’t you think?” He laughed, a strange sound, like the rattle of dry sticks or bones.
Hugh, looking up the stairs, could almost see him again, gliding down without touching the rail, a black shadow that grew larger and larger. Larger now than ever, he thought. He could understand why the Culbertson children, grown men and a grown woman, still feared and hated him. All his life he had gotten everything he ever set out after, everything. He had said that himself, and Hugh had believed and believed even more after looking him up in the newspaper files and asking questions about him around the campus and in town. Nothing he had wanted had ever been denied him. Last spring he had announced what he was going after next, laughing but not crazy. Oh, no, not crazy at all.
“Tell me why you’re convinced it can’t happen,” he had said that last night. “Oh, not that technical brain-as-a-machine part, but your own beliefs. All the rest is just a way to shore up your own beliefs. I want to know what your standing ground is, what the hell you’re shoring up.” Hugh had taken a deep breath, angry with the old man and his scorn, his arrogance. “You know we have to learn how to use our senses? The infant learns how to see, how to interpret the signals, for instance.” The old man nodded impatiently. “Okay. Along with the usual senses we all admit to, we develop another one that says, 7 am. Call it self, self-consciousness, ego, whatever you like. It will fight to maintain its integrity. It can’t simply step aside and stop existing because it’s a product of the cortex. It comes into being with the development of the cortex and as long as the cortex functions, this sense of I am endures. Powerful drugs, severe injury to the cortical area, or death can stop it, but nothing else can. No one can impose his sense of sight on you, make you see through his eyes. If I touch a stove, you can’t feel it. Imagining it is as close as you can come. You have senses that see, hear, taste, feel, touch, and one that says 7 am. They are equally inviolable.”
