Джон Макдональд - All These Condemned

“Maybe we don’t have to talk, Randy. We never have.”

“But I...”

“Just try to sleep. That’s all. I’ll be here. I’ll sit here in the dark until you fall asleep, if that’s what you want.”

I nodded. I was glad when the lights were out. When my face was in darkness, unseen. She had moved a chair close to the bed. I held my breath and I could hear her faint breathing. I began to feel the quietness of the drug. It moved out from the middle of me, crawling slowly down the marrow of my bones. It deepened my breathing.

Once when I was eleven I was very ill. Big faces loomed over me and moved back into shadows. Days and nights were all mixed up. And I would awake in darkness and hold my breath and then I could hear my mother in the big chair near my bed, breathing softly.

I knew what I wanted to ask of Noel. I flushed in the concealing darkness and then I made my voice as matter of fact as I could. “Would you mind very much holding my hand, Noel?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

She found my hand in the darkness. She held it in both of hers. Her hands were warm and dry. And very still. Why should it matter? They are hands. Tools for holding, lifting, grasping. Why should there be comfort in a touch?

The sleep of the drug began to come. I could feel it. It is like walking along balancing yourself on a curb that gets increasingly higher. You fall off and step back up, and fall off and step back up, and each time it is harder to step back up until you finally fall all the way off.

When the maid awakened me by banging on the door, I had absolutely no idea of where I was. The drug was still strong in me, deadening my mental reactions. I had the idea that I was on some sort of a business trip and this was a hotel room. I sat on the edge of the bed. It was early daylight. I stumbled into the bathroom, ran the cold water, cupped it in my hands, and scrubbed my face hard. It was coming back. Not all in a rush. Bit by bit, each inevitable piece fitting into the previously assembled pieces.

There is always an aspect of hope in awakening. It is a little like birth. A new day of life ahead. But each increment of memory destroyed a portion of that vague and feeble hope until there was none left. I stood alone in a gray place. The maid had called out something about everyone going to the big room. Maybe they had found the body. That fierce bright body, tumescent, full ripened, vigorous, and voracious. It could not be flesh, as other bodies are flesh. It could not die as others die. Not that thing of gloss and firmness, delicately pelted, ancient in its knowledge of hyperesthesia.

I went down the corridor. It had an odd look of being out of true, as though the right angles had suffered a distortion through pressure. And when I went into the big room and saw them there, saw them glance at me, their faces were odd, like cinema faces seen from a seat too far to the side of the screen.

I saw a chair beside Judy Jonah and sat in it and asked, too loudly. “What’s up, anyway?” My voice came back to my ears with that timbre of the voices of doctors and nurses as you are going under anesthesia. No one answered.

I leaned closer to Judy. “Did they find the body?” I asked her.

She gave me a surprised look. “Oh, yes. Almost an hour ago.”

I looked over at Noel. Her eyes moved across me and away, a bit unsteadily. Something about her puzzled me. As though she were newly vulnerable. No longer cold and classic and remote. Needing something. As though she needed to be reassured. She looked exhausted. And she sat awkwardly, with none of her customary grace. In some odd way she looked younger.

Steve was the last one. He had hurt his face somehow. He looked angry. Deputy Sheriff Fish stood and began to talk. I tried to follow what he was saying, but I could not. It was like one of those foreign movies without subtitles where you have to try to follow the plot from the actions and the facial expressions of the characters. They all had an odd look in the morning light. Peculiarly distorted. I was aware of a feeling of shock in the room and I leaned forward and I believe I probably frowned earnestly as I tried to translate. It seemed to be something about Wilma. And I saw Noel leave the room and I wanted to follow her and have her explain all this to me. It was as though, at a party, I had joined a group in the middle of a conversation and stood there, smiling and nodding, laughing when the others did, utterly unable to pick up the thread of meaning that would make everything clear. A group that I did not know, using its own private language, erecting little social walls, and waiting for me to go away. Voices heard under water. The voices of others on a train when you are more than half asleep.

It happened to me once, in college. I had gone into the wrong lecture. A lecture on symbolic logic. Each individual word was a perfectly good normal word, but try as I might, I could make no sense of what was being said. It made me wonder if I were going mad. As if communication were being blocked.

I wanted to go to Noel. There was my only safety. The only known place in the world.

But first...

On the way up he had to make one of his usual snotty cracks about Wilma, on account of how he is crazy jealous. What he ought to have is a dandy mechanical wife. Take her out of the closet and plug her into a light socket. He doesn’t want me to be a person .

After I put him in his place we drove on without talking, and I cried a little bit. He drove too damn fast, but I certainly wasn’t going to say a word about it, no matter what he did.

I sat ’way over there in my corner of the seat and I thought about the lovely new clothes I would wear. And about being a house guest where there are important people. Big people. The only flaw in the ointment was having to go up there with Paul. Like a race where your feet are tied together, like on picnics. I couldn’t be myself, not with him along. I couldn’t be free. And I decided right then and there that I’d let Wilma know that the next time there was a party, I’d certainly appreciate it if I could come without that dead stone weight hanging around my neck like the bird on that sailor in the poem we had in seventh grade.

And she would know what I meant, all right. She had him typed right down to the dotted i. “Mavis, dear,” she said, “he’s just a very ordinary man. He’s good in business, and I’m glad he works for me. But I couldn’t bear being married to him. God! Pipe and slippers and a household budget. You see, dear, he’s no challenge to you. And you need challenge. You need life and excitement. You didn’t know how dull your life really was, did you?”

She has him typed. He’s Rotarian and stuffy and provincial. He’s living in the Middle Ages. I just wished and wished that somebody else was driving me up to Lake Vale. Because I could see, from his snotty mood, that he was going to try to spoil things for me. That’s all he does. Spoil things. And someday he’s going to make me so mad that I’m going to let him know about Gilman Hayes and that afternoon in Wilma’s apartment. I can just imagine the look in his eyes.

Wilma had told me about the place, but gosh, words can’t describe it. It was like in House Beautiful . Only more so, if possible. I got real excited when I saw it. I could hardly breathe. And there was cars there already, like you don’t see just anyplace. One of those big sporty Buicks, and a little black English car with red wire wheels, and a gorgeous white Jaguar, with a cute little cartoon of Judy Jonah on the door of it. I wished I’d put my foot down harder and we had got a Jaguar. They’re so smooth looking. But no, Paul has to have this thing because he says there isn’t enough room in those.