All These Condemned

Chapter Fourteen (Randy Hess — Afterward)

She was dead.

I will try to say what I felt. How it was. Once when I was little there was a hypnotist on a stage. Somebody took me there. I remember the boy who went up, scuffing his feet, trying to swagger, giving swift looks at the audience. It was done so quickly.

You are a chicken. And the boy hopped and clucked and flapped his arms. You are a dog. And he scampered and barked. Oh, there was a lot of fun! Oh, they laughed! Wake up! Wake up!

The boy woke up. He stared stupidly around. They were still all laughing. I was laughing. He fled in confusion from the stage.

She was dead.

I woke up. I looked stupidly around at the world. Who am I? How did I get here? Why do they laugh? By what strange road did I get to this place?

I remember another time. A summer camp where I was very lonely and unhappy. They taught us first aid. A man who looked like an ape demonstrated a tourniquet. Roger and I were alone in the cottage during a rest period. It was a contest between us. We knotted huck towels and each used a drumstick to tighten the tourniquet on our own leg, midway between knee and thigh. Nearly as tight as we could get them, and then bet a dime about who would loosen it first. It was very tight. At first my leg throbbed and it was painful. It looked swollen. It turned a lot darker. And the pain went away. It felt quite numb. The contest went on for a long time and then the look of my leg and foot and the numbness began to frighten me. I said we should both loosen them at the same time. He would not. More time passed. I loosened mine. He yelled that I owed him a dime. The towel had cut into my thigh, marking it deeply. For a moment nothing happened. And then I screamed with the pain of returning circulation. I thought my leg would burst, would split open like something that had spoiled. But it did not. It felt weak and strange for a long time. I paid him my dime.

She had died and it was like cutting a tourniquet that had bitten deep, numbing me. The circulation came back. My soul could burst like something spoiled.

But it is more than that. A friend told me of something that had happened to him. Long ago. Back in the days of parachute jumps at the fair grounds, of wing walking, of slow barrel rolls. He had been young then. And madly, helplessly, hopelessly in love with the young wife of the star jumper. A lovely girl, he said. And one day, under a high Kansas sky, he stood with her by the grandstand while the biplane circled higher and higher above the fair grounds, buzzing and circling like a lazy insect. And while they talked she kept her eyes on the plane, and talked without nervousness. Her husband was to make his famous delayed jump. High, high over the hard earth the tiny plane waggled its wings and the drummers in the band began to long roll. Then, he said, the girl ceased talking and he saw her swallow once, her white throat moving convulsively.

The figure dropped, the tiny figure coming down and down through the clear air. He said there was a smell of fall in the fields, that there had already been warning of frost. And the wife held his wrist and she said, “Now!” And the figure still fell. And she said again, “Now!” And the figure still fell and the drum roll broke into a ragged silence and all the crowd breathed at once like some great beast, and the doll figure hit the autumn earth and rebounded from its hardness, and the great beast made a sound half scream and half roar. And my friend said that through that sound her ice fingers were still hard on his wrist and she was still saying, in that cadence, “Now — now — now.” And then she turned toward him with her eyes clear, unblinded, and with a pretty and bewildered half-smile, half-frown of puzzlement, she said, “But he...”

And then, he told me, her face changed and broke in a way that was quite the most horrible thing he had ever seen.

He lost track of her and then heard from a friend, about a year later, that she was with another show, that she was wing-walking again. He caught up with that other show at the Herkimer County Fair in upstate New York a week later, but found that she had turned slut and her trailer was a very public place indeed. It sickened him to see her like that.

And I was both. Not only the body falling, but the one who watched without true comprehension. And it was not yet clear to me what had happened to me. I was filled with a dreadful and aimless terror. It was good when Paul ordered me into the boat with the big flashlight. We went out onto the lake. It was one of those lights that contain a big square battery. The water looked like black oil. When I held the lens above the surface, the light rebounded. By touching the wide lens carefully against the surface, I could send a murky beam down and see motes drifting through it, like dust in a path of sunlight. I do not know what good it did. Sometimes I would see a flick of arm or leg in the beam as they fought their way down. I could hear the others talking on the dock with that peculiar tone of repression in the presence of sudden death. The side of the boat bit into the flesh of my upper arms, but I held the light steady, pointing down. I was aware of the timeless stars over me, the ancient hills around me, and of my own peculiar meaninglessness, a soft thin white creature in a boat he could not build, holding a light that he could not understand, while others dived, looking for the body of a woman he had never known.

Then I heard the sirens, rising and falling through the hills and the night, crying of lost things, a thin beast message of alarm and regret.

And Paul clung to the side of the boat, shoulder muscles bunched and gleaming in the starlight, and said we would stop looking, that too much time had passed.

They tipped the boat wildly as they came aboard. Hayes grasped a paddle and thrust us strongly toward the dock. I sat holding the dead light, trembling with exhaustion as though I too had dived hopelessly for her, straining lungs and muscles. When I got up onto the dock as Steve tied the runabout fast, my knees started to give way and I nearly fell before I caught myself.

They came out, walking heavily in their official manner, asking questions in voices calculatedly harsh and bored, asking names. And I stood there and heard the boats coming down the lake toward us, outboard motors out of cadence, bright lights moving closer.

I found Noel and I stood close to her. Close to her strength and her contempt, and I felt the helpless shame of a child caught in a nasty act. An act for which there are no amends, no excuses, no explanations. A child with that new awareness of evil in itself, and aware for the first time of the strangeness of the world and all that is in it, aware of the inevitability of loneliness.

“Noel, I...” I could not continue, because I had to close my throat against sobbing. She turned and looked up into my face. Her face was still and white. In that light it had an Egyptian look. A still face in a temple frieze, classic and cold.

I moved apart from the others and she followed me. I had not expected her to. “Yes?” she said in a low voice.

“Everything is...” And there was no word. Lost? Broken? Gone? Maybe in olden times men had words and were not ashamed to use them. Back when language was permitted to be dramatic. Before we muted ourselves with odd shame. We say, “I love you,” and suffix a nervous laugh, taking comfort in a diluted form of drama. We never declaim. It is all underplayed. Little Sheba never comes back. And we stand on no cold towers in the rain and talk with ghosts.

So I had no word.

Yet she knew how close I was to breaking. She touched my arm and we went up the curving concrete steps to the big terrace and in through the glass doors and to the left and down the corridor and to the room Wilma had given us.

Once the door was shut I lay on the bed. I looked blindly at the ceiling. For a time I was able to withstand the self-pity. And then I let it come in a sour flood. Taking sour comfort from it. No savings, no job, no pride, broken health, and a wife I had degraded. While the hypnotic focus had existed, all that had not mattered. I had been content, almost eager, to slide down and down and down. Now that shameful meaning was gone from me. So self-pity came, in all its tormented weeping ugliness. And she sat on the bed beside me and put her hand on my forehead. It was the gesture of a nurse. A starched white gesture performed without meaning, while the nurse counts the night hours and thinks of the laughing intern. And the knowledge that I did not even deserve that gesture of clinical comfort increased the spasms of self-rejection.

I was two people. One rolled and gasped and wept weakly on a guest-room bed, cursing God. And the other stood behind Noel and looked down at the figure on the bed and grinned in an evil way and chuckled silently and thought, Not enough, not enough, not nearly enough, you excommunicated priest, you filthy choirboy, you self-dramatizing fool. You threw yourself back and you know it’s too late. Baby wants candy. Buddy wants a bike. Roll and choke, you hopeless son-of-a-bitch.

“Here!” she said. “Here!”

And I propped myself up on one elbow and took the three round yellow pills from the palm of her hand, washed them down with a swallow of the water.

“Drink all the water.”

I did so, obediently, and handed her back the glass and lay back. I heard her in the bathroom, running water. She came back and stood by the bed.

“You ought to sleep. Will you be all right now?”

“Noel, we’ve... we’ve got to talk.”

For the first time she showed expression, her face twisting in something like pain. I saw that sometime during my unpleasant scene she had changed to skirt, sweater, and jacket.

“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...