Joseph Caldwell - Lazarus Rising

After Johnny had heard what the doctor had to say, he hung up but kept his hand on the phone a few seconds, then drew it away. He lowered his head and saw that there was a toothpick fitted into the groove between two floorboards. He had been picking his tooth while talking to his mother the day before. “You’re cured,” he said quietly.

“Yes. I know.”

He looked again at the phone. “You’re cured.” This time his voice tried to sound louder. Dempsey said nothing. He looked toward her. She was still at the table looking at the peeled orange she held in her hand. “You’re cured,” he said again. He moved toward her. “You—you’re cured, she told me.” He reached out his hand toward Dempsey’s shoulder. She pulled away. “But you’re cured!” he said.

“I know.” Her voice was barely audible.

“Do you know what that means?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“It means—it means—it means you’re—you’re cured.”

“Yes.”

“But—shouldn’t we do something? Say something?”

“What?”

“Something. Anything. Sing! Dance!”

Dempsey rubbed the tip of her fingers gently over the surface of the orange. “You make it sound like it’s the same as something like winning the lottery,” she said quietly. “Like we’re supposed to yell and jump up and down and hug each other as if we were on television. But it’s not the same. I’m cured. You prayed I’d be cured. And now I am. It’s not like the lottery. At least I don’t think it is.”

Making as little sound as possible, Johnny sat down across from her. He waited a moment, then said, “You—you think—I mean—it couldn’t—you don’t believe that just because I prayed… Do you believe that?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know what I believe.”

“Then can’t we just sit here?”

Johnny looked over at Dempsey. She was staring. Her mouth slightly open, her eyes filled, it seemed to him, with sorrow and fear and possibly with love. “What?” he whispered.

“Nothing.”

She looked up toward the ceiling. Johnny, too, looked up. The two of them, slowly moving their heads, searched the upper reaches of the entire room as if they might find there some presence, seen or unseen, some wise and gentle counsel that would explain to them what had happened and tell them what was happening now. They found nothing. Johnny looked at Dempsey’s hand. She was slowly tugging another slice free from the rest of the orange. “Please say something,” he whispered.

She waited a moment then said in a voice no louder than his. “Would you like some orange?”

Because he could refuse no offer she would ever make, because his love and his yearning were streaming out of him, escaping through every pore, reaching toward her, toward infinity, he said, “Yes. Thanks.” She set a slice in front of him. He waited, then picked it up and put it into his mouth and held it there. He didn’t want to chew, but after a few seconds, he chewed anyway.

A foghorn sounded from a distant ship. Johnny stood up and moved as quickly as he could to the outer deck. He wanted to throw up. He grabbed on to the rail and thrust his head out over the water. Nothing came. He leaned back and raised his head. “Don’t let her—don’t let her be cured—not by me. Not by me,” he whispered. “Don’t—” Again he leaned out over the rail. The water was gliding alongside the boat, thin, curled ripples the only disturbance made by the ferry’s lumbering bulk. “I mean—I mean—thank—”

He hiccupped. After a held breath he tried again to say the words. But he hiccupped three times in quick succession. He looked out over the water. He saw the Verrazano Bridge; he saw Governor’s Island, he saw a freighter and a container ship. One by one he looked at each of them and, as if in salute, he hiccupped to the Verrazano Bridge, to the freighter, to the container ship. He hiccupped to the water below. He hiccupped to the moon above.

Dempsey was completely confused in her quest for some suitable response to her cure. Numb at first, then restless as well, she became desperate to find some task that might lead her, if not to serenity, then at least to a minimal measure of stability. When a fit of trembling came to her, her first thought was that the illness had returned. She was having the familiar chill. She would shake. Her teeth would chatter; her bones shudder, and then the sweats would come. After that, perhaps a decent sleep, some welcome rest, the wet sheets cooling against her fevered flesh.

A possible peace suggested itself. She was still sick. She had not been cured after all. It had been a gigantic mistake. Nothing now would be required of her, no word, no deed, no response at all. She could just shake and shudder away, let the sweat seep out and then be given, perhaps, some good and blessed rest. All would be as it had been. Her death, faithful at last, had returned and she found solace in the trembling that racked her now.

But the trembling passed; the stupefaction remained.

Her Lazarus painting was not a possible response. The needed concentration and energy were nowhere to be found. Her skills were somewhere, but she felt no certainty that she could find them and put them to use. To occupy herself while thinking through her predicament, she decided to scrub the floor. The entire floor of the entire loft. With a hard-bristled brush, on her knees. Without hurry, she moved paintings and equipment, furniture and rugs, plants and books. With a firm circular gesture she scoured the gray painted wood, an active froth rising as the soapy water drew out the accumulated grime and dirt that had survived the perfunctory mopping she’d given the floor from the day of her arrival in the loft. Starting at the elevator, she worked her way through her studio area, finding two paintbrushes she’d forgotten she had, one unfinished painting from six years before (not half bad, considering how greatly her work had improved since then), and seventy-six cents in change. There was also a wooden spoon she didn’t recognize, possibly left behind by the previous tenant, a dead mouse long decayed, and under the rug, one of Johnny’s maroon socks. She would wash it and see that he got it back.

Then she remembered the day at least half a year ago when a single maroon sock was cursed for being without a mate and thrown into the trash. She’d cared that much at the loss of symmetry. Now, without further thought, she tossed this second sock into the wastebasket and resumed scrubbing. Perhaps the scrubbing itself was the purpose for which she had been cured.

When she was about four feet from the windowed wall in front of the loft, Dempsey stopped and sat back on her haunches for yet another rest. She brushed her arm across her forehead not because her hair had fallen into her eyes or because she was sweating. It just seemed the required gesture for someone scrubbing a floor. She’d already done it more than several times while working on the vast acreage that lay clean and fresh behind her. And she would probably do it at least once more before the final patch was done.

When she leaned forward again, putting weight onto the brush, getting ready to make the circular motion, she realized that she had, without knowing it, made an uncounted number of gestural paintings in the course of her scrubbing. Monochromatic they may have been, and somewhat repetitive, but surely she had performed a major exploration of what lay within the motion of her hand, her arm, her entire body. Everything within her, all her strength, all her patience and persistence, had gone into this work. She had given it all she had to give. She was tempted to look behind her, to view her achievement, to be awed by the immensity of her accomplishment. But it had all, of course, disappeared even in the act of its own creation. The rags with which she’d sopped up the detritus of the scrubbings had erased the frothing swirls, whole skyscapes and emerging galaxies, the limitless configurations of a universe at last revealed—all lost. There was nothing but an expanse of flooring, battleship gray, marked by parallel grooves between the boards.