Joseph Caldwell - Lazarus Rising

“Can you hold it just like that?” Dempsey asked. “I won’t take long.” She sat down on the low stool she used when sketching and picked up the pad and pencil. Johnny tried to keep the pose, but he’d made the mistake of rising onto the ball of his left foot. His heel was off the floor and the bent toes began to ache. He wished he hadn’t lifted his head quite so high. He should also have brought his upper right arm closer to his side so it could rest against his ribs. Now it was held out, half raised so his opened hand, angled toward his chest, could suggest the first moment of awe and surprise, as if he were trying to shield his heart from its own reactivated beat. If he could manage to forget that he wasn’t supposed to move, he could probably hold the pose indefinitely, but as usual, he couldn’t take his mind off the task he’d been given. His job was to hold still and therefore all concentration, all thought, all feeling, were given to holding still.

Dempsey’s tongue was sticking out, caught in the corner of her mouth. This meant she had become completely involved in what she was doing.

Sitting on the stool, she moved her head from side to side, then looked directly at him. “Try to imagine you’ve been in a deep, deep sleep where you’ve been given a dream of the deepest contentment and peace. And now, suddenly there’s a sound! A voice is demanding not only immediate and full awakening but an even more insistent command that you abandon your slumbers and surrender completely. Even the memory of the bliss is eradicated. Intrusion, disruption all senseless and beyond comprehension. Wake up! Get up! No appeal. No complaint! Arise! Arise to an unappeasable wrath!”

Two, three times, Johnny tried, but Dempsey refused to be satisfied. “Rage! Wrath! All you are is annoyed. Listen! You’ve been robbed! All you had been given is gone! Never to be found again. Arise! Arise!”

Then in a more challenging voice, she said, “Have you never had taken from you all that was a completion of yourself? You experienced the complete fulfillment of all that you truly are and it’s been obliterated forever! Gone! Gone! Have you never experienced that?”

Johnny slowly lowered himself off the ball of his left foot and wiped his forearm over his face. He swayed the upper part of his body back and forth three times. Then in a frightening voice Dempsey had never heard from him before, he said, “I’m ready. Are you?”

Forward his body went, as he drew himself up to his full height, the left hand held out, the right hand raised to his temple, but held away from him. He parted his lips and widened his eyes to a menacing rage.

“You’re getting it! You’re getting it!” Dempsey called out, “Rage! Wrath! Feel it. Know it. Be it!” She grabbed her sketching pencil and aimed it at the pad opened on her lap. “Don’t move,” she warned in a low voice. “You’ve got it. You’ve got it. Don’t move. Don’t move.”

Johnny had found the way to hold fast, not only to his risen body but to all the anguish, all the inextinguishable rage he felt for what had happened to him and to the bewildered woman he loved with a love that gave a measure to infinity.

He could hear the rough scratch and rub of the pencil, determined and brisk lines. If the sound didn’t end soon, he would go mad.

The painting was finished. Johnny had come and gone from the loft for the sessions needed to complete it, when his schedule allowed. All of his attempts to persuade Dempsey to allow him to move back in were met with the repeated response, “No. I know it’s terribly selfish. And it makes me sadder than anything, but I still can’t say yes. I can’t.”

The true sorrow he saw so often on Dempsey’s face shamed him, and he knew he had to give precedence to her needs rather than his own.

He did, however, have one last request. Since at the beginning of their collaboration, they had walked together from the ferry, would she—to observe the completion of their shared enterprise—walk with him back to the ferry? Her quietly amused answer was, “Of course. And thanks for asking.”

Now they were in Battery Park, walking slowly toward the harbor. It would be a while before the departure of the next ferry. Johnny wanted nothing more than to do whatever he could to prolong this time they would have together. In what he knew was an all too obvious ploy, he said as they passed the pizza concession, “How about a slice?”

Dempsey, to Johnny’s pleasant surprise, shrugged and said, “You want one?”

Johnny smiled to congratulate himself for his success and answered, “I won’t know until I get it.”

With yet another shrug, Dempsey said, “What better reason? Let’s do it.”

The pizza was sloppy. They had to hold it away from themselves so it wouldn’t drip on Johnny’s polo shirt or Dempsey’s clean blouse. “They’re so competitive,” Dempsey said. “The pizza business. Each one keeps piling on more glop than the next. Look at this. It’s intestinal. The cheese, it’s like viscera. The whole mess, a surgical retrieval on a doughy crust. Ugh. Delicious.” She took another bite.

They began to walk along the bench-lined path. Johnny swallowed and took another bite. The grease dripped down onto his white polo shirt. (He knew it was a polo shirt because in the place usually reserved for an alligator, there was a man on a horse, a mallet raised to strike an unincluded ball.) He aimed his crumpled napkin at the splotches, but Dempsey stopped his hand.

“Cold water. Right away.”

There was a line for the water fountain. “Forget it,” Johnny said.

Dempsey took a dainty handkerchief from her skirt pocket, went directly to the fountain, and stepping ahead of the line, soaked the cloth and came back to Johnny. No one had objected. She wiped the splotches, went back to the water fountain, repeated her intrusion, and gave the shirt another scrub. He could feel the cold water on his chest, running down toward his navel. He could also feel the pressure of Dempsey’s hand against his chest.

A straggle of Dempsey’s hair had gotten itself stuck in a gob of tomato sauce, pasting it to her cheek. It had also lengthened her lips to the smile of a clown and stained the tip of her nose as if she were being made up to play slapstick parts in a circus. Johnny took the handkerchief from her hand and gently restored her to what he considered her previous perfection.

Dempsey took their pizza remains and dumped them in the trash basket near the hot dog stand. When Johnny came toward her, she moved back onto the paved path and began walking again slowly toward the harbor. Johnny followed.

The line for tickets to the Statue of Liberty and to Ellis Island curled out of the old stone fort (which gave Battery Park its name) like the tail of a giant turtle. Two elderly men, short, with gray hair and stern faces walked by, holding hands. The wheels of a stroller sounded like the squeal of kittens being run over. A teenaged boy and girl in torn jeans and floppy T-shirts, rings in their ears and rings in their noses, were taking turns punching each other on the arm. A scrawny woman wearing sneakers but no socks was quarreling with someone unseen and a man herded four exuberant children toward the island boats, holding aloft like winning lottery numbers, the five tickets that would get them to the Statue of Liberty.

Johnny and Dempsey sat on a bench facing the promenade where the tourists had been herded together in a long tightly packed line to wait for the boats. Three men, African Americans, were entertaining the crowd with back flips—one, two, or even three and four flips in quick and daring succession. With nothing more than their will to propel them, they threw their bodies backwards, flipping themselves again and again, with a speed and sureness that for both them and the crowd were quite literally breathtaking. It was as if the immobilized tourists were being taunted for their voluntary stasis.