Eric McCormack - Cloud

Before we left the chapel, I went over to Gordon’s doctor and thanked him for complying with Gordon’s final request, whatever it was.

“All he wanted me to do was a simple little surgical procedure on his body,” he said. “His carotid arteries were to be severed, right there in the coffin. I did the procedure, with the undertaker as witness. We can both attest that Gordon’s blood was totally coagulated.”

He saw I was surprised to hear this.

“I can only suppose he wanted to be on the safe side,” said the doctor.

THE NEXT MORNING, we planted a young rose bush amongst his ashes in the backyard. That was my idea. In my tutor days, the natives who’d lived near one of the mines claimed that the very best orchids grew from rotting corpses. I thought if there was any truth to that, it might somehow apply to the ashes of the dead, too. So, with Alicia’s consent, I mixed Gordon’s ashes with some bags of potting soil and planted the rose bush in the midst of them.

Gordon’s death shocked me. I’d become very attached to him — he’d been a second father to me and seemed to care about me in that unconditional way my own parents had, though he was very different from them. Why he’d taken to me so much and chosen me as a suitable husband for Alicia, I never quite understood.

I’m not sure he himself knew. In spite of his theories, he may have let himself be guided by a feeling or an intuition— something a practical man like himself would normally have ignored. Perhaps he had an instinct that someone unlike himself might be the very man for Alicia.

Another enigma was that weird final request of his about the severing of his arteries. On the one hand, it might have been a matter of simple logic — the wish of a competent and efficient man to remain in control of his body right up to the moment of its disintegration. On the other hand, perhaps it revealed an aspect of his mind he generally kept to himself, one that was imbued with the ancient terror of being wrongly pronounced dead.

His incineration made me think yet again about the terrible deaths of my own parents in that inferno in the Tollgate. I’d never permitted myself to consider the possibility that they’d been quite aware of what was happening as the flames of their burning tenement engulfed them. The idea was still too much to bear.

ALICIA WAS DEVASTATED by her father’s death. For weeks she could barely hold back her tears. I think if it hadn’t been for little Frank, she’d have had a complete breakdown.

I tried to comfort her, but I knew the closeness of her bond with Gordon. They weren’t just father and daughter, they were each other’s confidants about everything. Or, not quite everything. He’d withheld his heart problem from her, no doubt so that she wouldn’t worry unduly.

I suggested it was only natural for a parent to try to protect his daughter in this way. But she seemed to regard it as a kind of betrayal by him, no matter how much they loved each other. It would take a while yet for her to forgive him entirely for that. Naturally, I didn’t mention the business of the severed arteries.

I MADE A FRESH discovery about her, too, a few weeks after the cremation. In the middle of the night she began fidgeting with the blankets and making whimpering sounds that woke me. In the glow of the night light, I could see she was actually still asleep. I shook her shoulder gently and she awoke, her eyes wide with fear.

I told her she’d been making noises.

“Did I disturb the baby?” she said, looking towards the door of the adjoining room where Frank slept.

I assured her he was sleeping peacefully and asked her if she’d been dreaming. I held her hand — it was very cold. I said talking about the dream might help.

“All right,” she said. Slowly she began translating whatever she’d dreamt into language.

“I was in freezing cold water,” she said. “It must have been winter and I’d somehow fallen out of some kind of boat into an ocean or a lake. It was nighttime and I couldn’t see any shore. But there were lights in the distance so I tried to swim towards them. Then my arms wouldn’t move, as though they were paralyzed. I shouted for help and I couldn’t get any words out, I could only make noises. Then you woke me up.”

I hugged her and reassured her. Her bad dream was surely related to Gordon’s death and her shock over the loss. She’d soon be having good dreams again.

“No, you’re wrong about that,” she said. “All my life that’s the only kind of dream I’ve ever had. I try not to think about them.”

I didn’t ask any more. I just kept holding her and soothing her and after a while she went back to asleep. But this revelation about her harrowing dream life disturbed me and kept me awake. Surely in some major way, this woman beside me, the mother of my son, was really a stranger.

AFTER BREAKFAST the next day when we were out in the yard playing with Frank, Alicia suddenly turned to me.

“Talking about that dream last night didn’t help at all,” she said. “In fact, putting it into words only made it seem worse.” She was looking right at me. “Not only that, I can see in your eyes that it’s got you worried, too.”

I denied that this was so, but it was unnerving to realize just how transparent I was to her.

DEATH OR NO DEATH, business had to be resumed. I was soon taking Gordon’s place behind his desk at the office, guided by two middle-aged secretaries who’d worked for him for many years and now had to get used to me. Jonson made sure the factory was back in full swing. Whatever sales trips I had to go on, I tried to make as brief as possible and was always anxious to get back to Camberloo.

But my homecomings had changed. Those sensual bedtime rituals we used to indulge in on my return didn’t occur. Eventually, when I alluded to them, Alicia (who was still as enticing to me as ever) made it clear, without being unpleasant, that they were over.

I was aware of how much the birth of Frank, physically, and the death of Gordon, emotionally, had wounded her. I assumed I was being too hasty and apologized for my thoughtlessness.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It has nothing to do with you. I just can’t. I don’t have any desire anymore.” And before I could say anything, she added: “Why don’t you find someone else to satisfy you in that area? Don’t men enjoy … a bit of variety?”

“A bit of variety”—the very phrase Gordon had used in his little talk to me not long before his death. Right away I was certain of what I’d suspected then: that they’d discussed this matter of my “needs” just as they’d discussed so much else. No doubt that was the very reason for Gordon’s heart-to-heart talk with me about what he considered the realities of marriage.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Alicia was saying. “Honestly, I wouldn’t.”

Honesty was, indeed, her trademark. At times, depending on the mood I was in, I’d wonder if this honesty of hers wasn’t so much a virtue as a lack of sufficient imagination to make up pleasing lies. For Gordon, a quality like honesty was probably a more-than-adequate alternative to true love. Whether he was right or not was something I’d have to find out.

In my role as Gordon’s successor at Smith’s Pumps, I spent a good part of the next number of years travelling. My itineraries brimmed with exotic-sounding names. In the East, I visited Kamchatka, Ulan Bator, Quingyang, Tanaga, Tuvalu, Banjarmasi, Port Moresby, the Tuamotus, Bangalore, Jabalpur, and Oamaru. I crossed and recrossed Africa, from Timbuktu and Addis Ababa to Nova Lisboa and back. The continent of South America, from Cochabamba, San Fernando de Atabapo, and Paysanchi to Rio Gallego in Patagonia, was part of my territory. In fact, the world was my territory.