CHAPTER 31

Michael’s Journal:

Engaging in imitative play with other children was traumatizing in grade school. Where there was no structure to group activity, I felt exposed by games, so preferred my own entertainments. Indeed, I spent my first week of recesses in the first grade staring into the reflective pane of a window until a teacher put a stop to it.

Until the third grade, my only friend was imaginary, and given my overall lack of peer interaction, my teacher at the time deemed it best I should be held back a year because I was “too socially immature” to progress. In the third grade (the second go-round), I decided to make at least one real friend—if only to keep bullies at bay. This arrangement served me well until my hormones sprang to life, whereupon another level of social accommodation was required.

Being skinny with an overbite, the ugliness I saw in myself gave me good cause to be apprehensive of girls. I thought they mocked when they professed love for me in front of laughing children. When one girl wrote my name all over her notebook, I rejected the gratuitous act as another attempt to ridicule me. Later I came to realize these perceived slights were probably childish expressions of true regard, but no amount of retro-reasonableness as an adult has remedied my ongoing difficulty with the opposite sex.

I believe my wounded psyche from youth gave me more excuse than reason to grow up and idealize women as distant and dreamy abstractions. Like a memory distilled in remembrance, like an acquaintance improved in recollection, like a magical photograph safe from moths and all diminution of body and allegiance—the women I have loved most freely, most profoundly, have been those I found in magazines, catalogs, and movies.

As a young man, I fell madly in love with the actress Vivien Leigh. It did not matter that she had been dead for fifteen years. I covered every inch of my bedroom walls with hand-painted cardboard posters I made of her. Each night I bedded down under her beautiful constellation and contented myself too happily to my unrequited feeling.

Idealization, then, was simply a boy’s imaginary fort retooled for adulthood. But instead of the fort giving me refuge from females, it allowed me to hide within the very edifice of them.

DEUS EX MACHINA

The fiery darkness pushed down into his innermost depths, filling him to burst. His nostrils stung with the hot scent of it before he started gagging. He choked on blood. A façade ripped away with a shriek, causing the black smoke to go white scratching at the car hood.

A flashlight poked in from an unfixed place, and a close voice rang out over the thumping of hammers and saws. “Hello...?!"

Michael batted his eyes.

“Stay calm, mister! We’ll have you out of there soon!”

The heat off the front of the automobile was unbearable. The vehicle’s door peeled away seconds before men in dark jumpers lifted him into the cooler night air. Michael, liberated more in body than mind, looked up to see the shadow of worldly death clinging to the treetops. In a distillation, a prismatic rain followed him to the ground, where he watched police and firemen swarm over the car.

One frantic worker fought the flames with desperate words. “Is anyone else in there?”

The injured man tried to form her name in his parched mouth.

A cry shot out over the chorus of confusion. “Where’s the goddamn ambulance?”

A snort was at his ear, and a puff of breath. Michael arched his head to see first a halo of broken glass, and then the form of a prostrate animal lying beside him on the asphalt in a pool of thickening blood. He raised his fingers to stroke the expiring horse’s cheek; the red and blue emergency lights, like doppler-shifted galaxies, raced away over the lipid dome of its dark panoramic eye. Sweeping him off the wet pavement, two men strapped his broken body to a gurney and shoved him head first into the back of an ambulance. Twirling lights sprayed the high grass along the road, and scrunching rain on the windows made each light pole in passing fishhook in a way unconnected to Earth. The siren summoned the city out of a shroud, and before he knew it the white interior of the ambulance became the white corridor of a hospital; emergency people rushed in from all sides.

His words tumbled over his chest. “I didn’t see the horse until it was too late.”

“Horse…?” The male nurse looked down. “Just relax!”

Michael struggled to be coherent. “My lawyer. Call my lawyer. Tell him: Gort, Klaatu barada nikto…”

The nurse’s expression was severe. “What you need is a doctor, pal!”

“Gort, Klaatu barada nikto,” the patient repeated.

Another stretcher, paralleling his, was covered with a white sheet.

The same male attendant snapped at someone. “Get her out of here.”

A chasm opened up between the stretchers in the haze. Swinging doors bumped Michael’s gurney before he plunged into a darker passageway. He could not move the limbs of his distant body, yet his sense of himself was one of water sloshing around an uncertain point of consciousness.

A faint nimbus chewed at the shadow’s edge. Michael felt confident enough in the impression to reach up and touch it; a blanket was hooked over window curtains.

“Mike?”

“Ommie…?”

The patient’s fingers dropped to graze an IV tube. “Am I dead?”

The lawyer was his usual phlegmatic self. “Do you remember your birth?”

“No.”

“Then why the hell should you remember your death? The question is immaterial.” Omar leaned forward in his chair with a creak, catching his friend up. “It was a nasty wreck.”

The painter recalled it in a flood. “We were to marry.”

“Marry…?” the trenchant lawyer chuckled. “She must have let you peek at her tits.”

Something flopped on the bed; the hard edge of a book was at Michael’s fingertips.

“They found your journal about a quarter of a mile from the crackup,” Omar explained.

The writer patted the abraded cover.

The friend was less severe. “You and I are different, but we ultimately want the same thing.”

Michael lifted an eyebrow.

The philosopher fleshed it out in palatable language. “Our heart compels us to speak, Grasshopper, and our head compels us to explain what we say. There is no perfect way to end with words what begins with words. Specificity is the enemy of every lofty aspiration, which is why the only perfect marriage between heart and head is where both share an ideal, if not the same understanding of the ideal. This agreement is not based on mutual self-deception, but on acknowledging the ideal is bigger than either party; and the less said on the subject, the better.”

“As my legal counsel, what is the ideal in this agreement?”

“The head is given closure, and the heart is given happiness.”

“A happy ending?”

Omar rose to his feet. “Is she in the morgue?”

“Yes.”

“I told you I would take care of this, didn’t I?”

“Yes, Ommie.”

“Haven’t I always been your protector against bullies? Your collector of ugly bugs?”

“Without fail.”

The take-charge friend was about to turn to the door when Michael delayed him with words familiar between them. “‘Of all the evil I deem you capable, therefore I want only the good from you… Let your kindness be your final conquest.’”

Omar smiled at the Nietzsche quote, but, not wanting to indulge his sentimental friend further, stepped into the hallway; the nurse’s station was in sight. As he approached the lobby adjoining it, he crossed paths with a squeaky revolving door yielding to a stiff breeze. Hospital staffers were set off on the black landscape beyond it, and resembled Druid stones gazing ponderously into a Stygian sky. The wind barely noticed them creeping past into the building. A stack of loose circulars was kicked up in the deviltry. One wrapped around the leg of a nearby newspaper dispenser. The banner headline told the story:

HOMECOMING, HALLOWEEN, AND METEOR SHOWER CONVERGE ON TOWN.

The nurse heard him, but, on glancing at the monitors, saw no one in the lobby. Turning to the desk, Omar stood there in a greeting. “This wing is closed to visitors,” she said with a start. The last word hung on her tongue, for in casting an eye to the wall behind the lawyer, the woman was dumbfounded to see the shadow of feathery wings stretch from the dropped ceiling to the polished floor. “Who are you?” she faded.

“Icarus. Son of Daedalus,” answered the world-destroying angel. Laying a finger on her forehead, he added tenderly, “But you can call me The Sandman…”

The nurse’s head fell softly to the granite counter, and in leaning in to kiss her cheek, Omar studied the bank of security monitors. He proceeded into the stairwell without interference, and descended steps to a basement level. Rounding a drafty corner at the bottom, a narrow cinderblock passageway pressed in.

An orderly punched out of swinging doors at the corridor’s end. “Hey!” he shouted. “You’re not supposed to be down here!” He walked up to bar the intruder.

Omar touched the man’s shoulder with a simple command. “Sleep.”

The orderly collapsed without a struggle to the floor.

The angel knelt over him, whispering, “And when you awake, you will be with me in Paradise.”

He stepped to the set of double doors and peered inside the morgue. A master box of fuses ran parallel to the entrance, and on snapping off its padlock, the trespasser located the appropriate breaker inside. With the flipping of the switch, the basement level was swallowed by darkness that felt more like a continuation than an interruption of something. Omar walked through the doors and up to two sheet-draped cadavers laid out on embalming tables. He pinched the stiff fabric at her waist and let gravity tug the remainder into the icy floor, whereupon he crawled up to negotiate the woman’s blackened legs and blunt edges. The metal substrate rumbled under his kneecaps, though distantly…

“I hear thunder.” Michael looked around through the branches. “Maybe we should finish tomorrow.”

Omar, undeterred by threatening weather still too far away to see, fixed his eye high in the tree. He exclaimed, “I can see it! Up there!”

“What?”

“A praying mantis! See it?”

The dizzying height made it impossible for the timid boy to contemplate the view. “Not really.”

Omar huffed, “Well I do, asshole. This will be the crown jewel of our bug collection!” With the proclamation, he shimmied up the trunk amid a cascade of crumbling bark. Michael eased away. “Careful!”

The braver boy inched out onto a tapering branch that swung dangerously over a rapid brook. The praying mantis was motionless against a clump of emerald green leaves, serenely confident in the thought she was invisible.

Michael cringed below. “Watch her pinchers!”

A crack shot out over the water—Omar followed the tree limb down with a splash. He was at once twisted in a braid and yanked downstream. His terrified friend bobbed on the bank, though his cries were muddied in the gurgle. The submerged boy fought to unscrew himself from the grip of the raging torrent, but it possessed an indomitable will dragging him mercilessly over gravel and jutting sticks. Fractured pictures of the darkening forest glistened in the spray, pointing the way to light—up to a face in the radiant mantle. Yet it was only mackerel clouds woven deceptively in among jetty foam. Spinning trees raked through their rain-swollen bellies and pushed them further from reach. Omar opened his mouth to call down a branch to save him, but the bitter, frothing water raced down to the very bottom of him…

The orderly pushed on the swinging doors, stirring formaldehyde in the refrigerated air like combustible gas. His flashlight danced over the aluminum tables, although it was something lying in the floor that reinforced his suspicion about hearing a noise. Setting the lantern down to retrieve the fallen sheet, he was taken aback to feel warmth emanating from the tabletop.

Had there been two bodies in here? he wondered.

He was compelled to check under the second sheet on the adjacent table. The bloated body of the drowned boy was translucent in the white beam: His skin appeared to be stitched together from fairies’ wings. On re-covering the corpse, the orderly backed out of the morgue, though paused at the double doors on stumbling over the other half of the mystery.

The tripped circuit breaker was reset in the fuse box.