Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

“You’re not a monster. You’ve done monstrous things, but that doesn’t make you a monster. You killed to heal your hurt and anger, you killed to mend the tears in your spirit. And it felt good. But it didn’t really work, and when the good feeling wore off you hurt more than ever, and so you had to kill more and more. And finally it didn’t work at all and it didn’t even feel good, and you couldn’t stop. And you had to stop, and you knew that, and you came here. Because you knew you would find the space here to heal yourself.”

“How?”

“By doing what you’ve already done, coming in touch with the parts of you that were always sickened by what you’ve done. And by standing in front of us and telling us who you are and what acts you’ve performed. You’ve already had a powerful healing experience tonight, Mark, and we’ve all been healed for sharing in it. Look at all the people who had to lie down and breathe. You touched something in each of them, something they needed to process in order to be whole themselves. Their own bottled-up pain, their hurt and fear and anger. Their death urges. And the killer inside them, the killer they couldn’t know about until you revealed your own killer self. You’ve played a great part in helping all of us grow, Mark. That’s why we’re so grateful to you.”

“Grateful,” he said.

“Oh, yes. You’ve given us a great gift. You’ll give us another when we manage to forgive you.”

“How can anyone forgive me?”

“How can we dare to do otherwise? We don’t do anything for you by forgiving you. And we don’t hurt you by withholding our forgiveness. We only hurt ourselves. There’s a woman here who lost most of her family in Nazi concentration camps. She spent two days last week forgiving Hitler. Do you think it had any effect on Hitler? The son of a bitch has been dead for over forty years, and I don’t suppose it makes much difference to him whether or not Ida Marcum forgives him. But she had angina so bad they wanted to do bypass surgery, except they didn’t think she’d survive it. And now she’s fine.”

He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate. It seemed very simple to him. He had done bad things. Now he should be punished. Instead she talked about healing, and he didn’t know what he had that had to be healed.

As if reading his mind, she said, “Of course you’d rather be punished. That would be much easier than going through what you haven’t gone through in forty years. Who do you think you’ve been trying to kill all your life, Mark?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“When I was with Kimberley,” he said, “a voice told me she was my sister. And ever since then, whenever I’ve looked at one of the women here, I had the same thought. That she was my sister.”

“So?”

“Maybe all along I’ve been trying to kill my sister.” He considered it, then shook his head decisively. “But that doesn’t make sense. I was an only child, I never had a sister.”

“You wanted to kill all kinds of women, didn’t you, Mark?”

“Yes.”

“They weren’t all of a physical type.”

“No. I once had the thought—”

“Yes?”

“I hate to say it. All right. I had the thought that I wished all the women in the world had a single throat, and I had my hands around it.”

Three women who had sat through everything up to this point rose as one, made their way through the crowd, and stretched out and began breathing. Sara didn’t pay any attention to them. She said, “When someone’s angry at all the women in the world, it usually means there’s one woman he’s really angry at.”

“Who?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“Not my mother.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “It’s always your parents, isn’t that the message of psychology? But it can’t be true this time. I never knew my mother. She died when I was born.”

“So you couldn’t possibly have any feelings about her.”

“How could I? I never laid eyes on her. I have no memory of her. And how could I be trying to kill somebody who’s been dead as long as I’ve been alive?”

“Do you remember your birth, Mark?”

“Of course not. Nobody does.”

“Everybody does, but not everybody allows the memory to surface. Do you know anything at all about your birth?”

“Just that I lived and she died.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

“I’m not surprised. I could tell you things, but you have to look at them yourself. You’re going to have to lie down and breathe, Mark. Everybody here will be supporting you with their breath. You’re going to have to go to a very frightening place, but you were there once before and you survived it the last time. You’ll survive it now.”

“I…”

“Yes, Mark?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Good,” she said.

The semicircle was a full circle now, and he was in the middle of it. He was lying on his back with his arms at his sides and his eyes closed. Someone’s long-sleeved shirt, rolled into a ball, was under his neck for a pillow. Sara sat on one side of him, Richard’s mother Ellie on the other.

He did as he was told, drawing full breaths into his upper chest, beginning to exhale as soon as he had completed inhaling, then letting the next breath flow out of the first one. Sara held his hand and Ellie guided his breathing, telling him when to breathe faster or slower, more shallowly or more deeply, to see his chest filling with light when he inhaled, to let the exhale flow effortlessly out of him.

Almost immediately something started to happen. He felt a light tingling, first in his hands and feet, then deepening there and spreading gradually throughout his body. His arms were rigid at his sides, and the volume of energy flowing through his hands was so great that he could not flex his fingers. He no longer knew if Sara was still holding his hand. He couldn’t even feel the ground beneath his palms.

Thoughts tumbled through his mind, vanishing from view before he could identify them. He was bathed in feelings, one after another. He would snatch at an idea and try to follow along after it, and evidently it led him away from consciousness, because Ellie would be shaking him, urging him to breathe, and it would seem to him that he had never stopped breathing, but at her command he would rouse himself from his reverie and fill his lungs with air.

And then there was a point where he felt cramped, confined. He was warm, too, impossibly warm, roasting, and furious with whoever had decided to build up the fire. He was going to suffocate or die of the heat, and he couldn’t understand why nobody would do anything, and his fury mounted and he pounded at the earth with his rigid hands and vented his anger in a wordless roar.

Then more things happened, and it seemed they happened very quickly. His breathing accelerated, so that he was gulping air as quickly as he could. But he could not get enough air, and his throat locked and he couldn’t breathe. Sara was bending over him and Ellie was cradling his head in her arms, shouting at him to breathe, telling him he could do it, but he couldn’t do it, his throat was locked shut, he couldn’t get any air in or out, he was going to die like this, he was going to suffocate, the light within him would go out, and all these fucking women could think to do was tell him to breathe breathe breathe, what was the matter with the bitches, why didn’t she do something, why couldn’t she help him, what fucking good was she, she might as well be a corpse for all the goddamned good she was doing him—

And then he got the breath release. Whatever had been holding on let go, and he drew air into his lungs, and the breath flowed in and out of him now as if it were breathing him. His lungs filled and emptied, filled and emptied, keeping time to some unheard metronome. He had never breathed so deeply before, his lungs had never filled themselves so completely, and air had never had such a sweet richness to it. You could live on air like this, you could nourish yourself with it, and it was so good, everything was so good, the world was so good and all the people in it. And he felt their presence now, all of them, circling him, breathing with him, supporting his breathing with theirs, and his heart filled up and overflowed, it felt too big for his chest, and he wept, God, how he wept, he couldn’t help it, he couldn’t stop crying.