Green Eyes

Chapter 3

The road to Shadows was unmarked, or rather the marker - an old metal Grapette sign - had been overgrown by a crepe myrtle, and a live oak branch, its bark flecked with blue-green scale, had cracked off the trunk and fallen across the bush, veiling it in leaf spray and hanks of Spanish moss. But Jocundra caught a glint of metal as she passed and slammed on the brakes. The van fish tailed and slewed onto the shoulder, and the man beside her was thrown forward against the safety harness. His head bounced on the back of the seat, then he let it loll toward her and frowned.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘These brakes are awful. Are you all right?’ She touched his leg in sympathy and felt the muscles jump.

The silence between them sang with tension. Crickets sawed, a jay screamed, the thickets seethed and hissed in a sudden breeze, and all the sharp sounds of life seemed to be registering the process of his hostility toward her. His frown softened to a reproving gaze and he turned away, staring out at the clouds of white dust settling around the van.

‘We should be there in another half hour,’ she said. ‘And then I’ll fix us some lunch.’

He sighed but didn’t comment.

Heat rippled off the tops of the bushes, and every surface Jocundra touched was slippery with her sweat. A mosquito whined in her ear; peevish, she slapped at it and blew a strand of hair from her eyes. She backed up, setting his head bouncing again, and headed down a gravel track whose entrance was so choked with vegetation that vines trailed across the windshield, and twigs bearing clusters of yellow-tipped leaves tattered at the side vent and swatted her elbow. Rows of live oaks arched overhead and the road was in deep shade, bridged by irregular patches of sunlight falling through rents in the canopy. Once it had been a grand concourse traveled by gleaming carriages, fine ladies and fancy gentlemen, but now it was potholed, ferns grew in the wheel ruts, and the anonymous blue vans of the project were its sole traffic.

The potholes forced her to drive slowly, but she could hardly wait to reach Shadows and hand him over to the orderlies. Maybe an hour or so of being alone would make him more amiable. She leaned forward, plucking her dress away from her damp skin, and glanced at him. He just stared out the window, his fingers twitching in his lap. The brown suit they had issued him at Tulane was too short in the arms, exposing knobbly wrists, and when she had first seen him wearing it she had thought of the teenage boys from her home town dressed in their ill-fitting Sunday best, waiting for the army bus to carry them off to no good future. He was much older, nearly thirty, but he had the witchy look that bayou men often presented: hollow-cheeked, long-nosed, sharp-chinned, with lank black hair hanging ragged over his collar. Not handsome, but not ugly either. Large hazel eyes acted to plane down his features and gave him a sad, ardent look such as you might find in an Old Master’s rendering of a saint about to die of wounds gotten for the love of Christ. His irises were not yet showing a trace of green.

‘You know, I was born about forty miles from here,’ she said, embarrassed by the artificial sunniness in her voice. ‘Over on Bayou Teche. It’s beautiful there. Herons and cypresses and old plantation homes like Shadows…’

‘I don’t want to talk.’ His voice was weak but full of venom; he kept his eyes turned toward the window.

‘Why are you so angry?’ She put her hand on his arm, probing the hollow of his elbow. ‘I’m just trying to be friendly.’

He looked at her, eyes wide, confused, and she wondered how it would be, her own flesh cool and numb, and the fingers of a more vital creature firing the nerves, sending charges into the midnight places of the brain. She pictured mental lightnings striking down in a landscape of eroded thoughts, sparking new life, new memories; but it would be nothing so dramatic. Things dawned slowly upon them. Every sensation, it seemed, held for them a clue to their essential wrongness, their lack of true relation to the world, and they struggled to arrange the murky shapes and unfamiliar smells and ringing voices into structures which would support them.

Breath whistled in his throat, but he didn’t speak; he leaned back and closed his eyes.

His name - his ‘zombie’ name - was Donnell Harrison, though the body had once hosted the dreams and memories of Steven Mears, a carnival worker dead of alcohol poisoning at the age of twenty-nine. He did not remember Mears’ life, however; he remembered having been a poet and living with his wife Jean in a mountain cabin. ‘The air was clarity,’ he had said. ‘The rain fell like peace.’ Almost singing the phrases, he had told her how his wife had died, crushed beneath a roofbeam during a storm. His hand had clawed at the armrest of the sofa as he strained to express the emotion swelling in him, and Jocundra had imagined that his skin contained not flesh and blood, but was tightly stretched over a cool darkness lit by a tendril of green fog, the magical analogue of a tungsten filament at the center of a light bulb. She had listened to the tapes so often since the initial interview that she had memorized his final outburst.

‘Old men, old liars drowsy with supper and the hearth, their minds grazing on some slope downward of illusion into death, they’ll tell you that the wild north king visits the high country disguised as a wind, blowing up spectacles of lightning-flash and hosannas of cloud. But this storm was animal, a wave of black animal breath bigger than the beginning. All its elements infected the land, making it writhe like the skin of a flea-infested dog, setting St Elmo’s fire to glimmer in the pinetops, decaying the stones into thunder, rotting the principles of ordinary day until the light caught fire and roared…’

Then, at the realization of loss, understanding, the magnitude of the tragedy he had invented for himself, he had broken off his life story and sunk into a depression. Jocundra had not been able to rouse him. ‘Slow-burners always go through a fugue,’ Edman had told her. ‘It’s as if they realize they’re in for the long haul and better get their act together, slow their pace, reduce their intensity. Don’t worry. Sooner or later he’ll come around.’ But Jocundra was not sure she believed Edman; all his advice to her reeked of bedside manner, benign assurances.

The potholes became so wide she had to ease down into them and use the four-wheel drive to climb out. The live oaks thinned and swamp country began. Stretches of black, earth-steeped water were ranked by gaunt cypresses, their moss-bearded top branches resembling the rotted crosstrees of a pirate fleet mouldering in the shallows. Gnats blurred the air above a scaly log; a scum of rust-colored bubbles clung to the shoreline reeds. It was dead-still, desolate, but it was home ground to Jocundra, and its stillness awakened in her a compatible stillness, acting upon her tension like a cold compress applied to a fevered brow. She pointed out the landmark sights to Donnell: a wrinkle in the water signaling the presence of a snake, dark nests in the cypress tops, a hawk circling over a thicketed island. Prodded by her touch, he lifted his head and stared, using - she knew -some vague shape or color of what he saw to flesh out his life story, adding hawks or a pattern of cloud to the sky above his mountain cabin.

The swamp gave out into palmetto glades and acacia, stands of bamboo, insects whirling in shafts of sunlight, and they came to an ironwork gate set into a masonry wall. A tar paper shack stood beside it. The security guard logged their arrival on his clipboard. ‘Y’all have a nice day,’ he said, winking at Jocundra as if he knew nice days were not in the cards.

The grounds were gloomy and gently rolling. A flagstone path bordered with ferns and azalea meandered among enchanted-looking oaks, which fountained up at regular intervals. They overspread the lawn, casting a dark green shade upon the stone benches beneath them; thin beams of sun penetrated to the grass as a scatter of gold coins. And at the center of the gloom, glowing softly like the source of the enchantment, was a two-story house of rose-colored brick with white trim and fluted columns across the front. A faceted glass dome bulged from the midpoint of its gabled roof. Two orderlies hustled down the steps as Jocundra pulled up and helped Donnell into his wheelchair.

‘If you’ll take Mr Harrison to the suite,’ she said, ‘I’ll see he gets checked in.’ And paying no attention to Donnell’s alarmed reaction, she walked out along the drive.

From the bench nearest the gate, the brightness of the brick and trim made the house appear to be rippling against the gloom, as if while she had been walking it had reverted to its true form - a black castle, a gingerbread house - and in turning back she had caught it unawares. It was an unlikely place for scientific work, though its gothic atmosphere bolstered the image Edman had fostered; he had suggested that Shadows would be an Experience, spoken about it in terms suited to the promotion of a human potential group rather than demystifying it as he usually did any hint of the occult. She had talked to other therapists who had been at Shadows, but most had seemed traumatized, unwilling to discuss it. Even the microbiologists had been hazy at her briefing, saying they knew little about the new strain of bacteria with which Donnell had been injected. ‘He’ll be longer lived,’ Ezawa had said. ‘Better motor control, sharper senses. Watch his visual development especially, and keep in mind he won’t be easy to fool. He’s no short-termer.’

No doubt about that, she thought, as she began strolling back to the house. Before lapsing into his depression, Donnell had displayed a subtle good humor, a joyful appreciation of life apparently grounded in a realistic assessment of its pleasures and pains, this far different from the short-termers: cloudy, grotesque creatures who clutched and stared until you feared you would burn up under the kindling glare of their eyes. They had many of the qualities of the zombies in her father’s lurid bedtime stories: dazed, ragged men and women stumbling through plantation fields at midnight, penned in windowless cabins fifty or more to a room, stinking, shuffling, afraid to touch each other, sustained on water and unsalted bread. ‘They ever get a taste of salt,’ her father had said, ‘they’ll head straight for the buryin’ ground and try to claw their way back into Hell.’ Sometimes the straw boss would send them after runaway slaves, and the slave would scramble through the swamp, eyes rolling and heart near to bursting, hearing the splash of the zombie’s tootsteps behind him or seeing its shadow rear up from the weird fogs wreathing the cypress, reaching for him with rotting fingers and arms rigid as gibbets. Let the slave escape, however, and the zombie would wander on, single-mind-edly searching until years later - because a zombie lives as long as the binding magic holds; even if its flesh disintegrates the particles still incorporate the spirit -maybe a hundred years later, the image of its quarry grown so amorphous that it would react to any vaguely human form, the zombie spots a lighted window in a house on the bayou and is drawn by the scent of blood… Her father had banged the bottom of the bed, jumped up in mock terror, and she had lain awake for hours, shivering, seeing the tortured faces of zombies in the grain of the ceiling boards.

But there was no such witchery involved with Donnell, she thought; or if there was, then it was witchery of an intensely human sort.

She had a moment of nervousness at the door; her stomach grew fluttery, as if crossing the threshold constituted a spiritual commitment, but she laughed at herself and pushed on in. No one was in sight. The foyer faced large cream-colored double doors and opened onto a hallway; the walls were painted pale peach, and the doorways ranging them were framed with intricate molding. Ferns splashed from squat brass urns set between them. Church quiet, with the pious, sedated air common to sickrooms and funeral homes.

‘Jocundra!’ A lazy, honeysuckle voice.

From the opposite end of the hall, a slim ash blond girl in hospital whites came toward her, giving a cutesy wave. Laura Petit. She had been an anomaly among the therapists at Tulane, constantly encouraging group activities, parties, dinners, whereas most of them had been wholly involved with the patients. Laura punctuated her sentences with breathy gasps; she batted her eyes and fluttered her hands when she laughed. The entire repertoire of her mannerisms was testimony to filmic generations of inept actresses playing Southern belles as shallow, bubbly nymphs with no head for anything other than fried chicken recipes and lace tatting. But despite this, despite the fact she considered the patients ‘gross,’ she was an excellent therapist. She seemed to be one of those people to whom emotional attachment is an alien concept, and who learn to extract a surrogate emotionality from manipulating friends and colleagues, and - in this case - her patients.

‘That must have been yours they just wheeled in,’ she said, embracing Jocundra.

‘Yes.’ Jocundra accepted a peck on the cheek and disengaged.,

‘Better watch yourself, hon! He’s not too bad lookin’ for a corpse.’ Laura flashed her Most Popular smile. ‘How you doin’?’

‘I should check in…’

‘Oh, you can see Edman when he makes his rounds. We’re real informal here. Come on, now.’ She tugged at Jocundra’s arm. ‘I’ll introduce you to Magnusson.’

Jocundra hung back. ‘Is it all right?’

‘Don’t be shy, hon! You want to see how your boy’s goin’ to turn out, don’t you?’

As they walked, Laura filled her in about Magnusson, pretending genuine interest in his work, but that was camouflage, a framework allowing her to boast of her own triumph, to explain how she had midwifed the miracle. Dr Hilmer Magnusson had been their initial success with the new strain: the body of a John Doe derelict now hosting the personality of a medical researcher who, less than a month after his injection, had casually handed them a cure for muscular dystrophy: a cure which had proved ninety-five percent effective in limited testing.

‘One day,’ said Laura, her voice rising at the end of each phrase, turning them into expressions of incredulity, ‘he asked me for his Johns Hopkins paper, the one he remembered first presentin’ the process in. Well, I didn’t know what he was talkin’ about, but I played along and told him I’d send for it. Anyway, he finally got impatient and started workin’ without it, complainin’ that his memory wasn’t what it used to be. It was incredible!’

Things, Jocundra observed, had a way of falling into place for Laura. Doors opened for her professionally, attractive men ditched their girlfriends and came in pursuit, and now Magnusson had produced a miracle cure. It was as if she were connected by fine wires to everything in her environment, and when she yanked everything toppled, permitting her passage toward some goal. The question was: were her manipulative skills intellectually founded, or had she simply been gifted with dumb luck as compensation for her lack of emotionality? It was hard to believe that anyone of intelligence could erect such a false front and not know it was transparent.

Slashes of sunlight fell from louvred shutters onto the carpet, but otherwise Magnusson’s room was dark, suffused by an odor of bay rum and urine. At first Jocundra could see nothing; then a pair of glowing eyes blinked open against the far wall. His pupils had shrunk to pinpricks; his irises flared green and were laced with striations of more brilliant green, which brightened and faded. The glow illuminated a portion of his face, seamed cheeks tattooed with broken veins and a bony beak of a nose. His wheelchair hissed on the carpet, coming close, and she saw that he was an old, old man, his facial muscles so withered that his skull looked melted and misshapen.

Laura introduced them.

‘Jocundra. Such a charming name.’ Magnusson’s voice was weak and hoarse and expressed little of his mood. Each syllable creaked in his throat like an ancient seal being pried up.

‘It’s Creole, sir.’ She sat on the bed facing him. There were food stains on his bathrobe. ‘My mother was part Creole.’

‘Was?’

‘Both my parents died several years ago. A fire. The police suspected my father had set it.’

Laura shot her a look of surprise, and Jocundra was surprised at herself. She never told anyone about the police report, and yet she had told Magnusson without the slightest hesitation.

He reached out and took her hand. His flesh was cool, dry, almost weightless, but his pulse surged. ‘I commiserate,’ he said. ‘I know what it is to be alone.’ He withdrew his hand and nodded absently. ‘Rigmor, my great-grandmother, used to tell me that America was a land where no one ever need be alone. Said she’d had that realization when she stepped off the boat from Sweden and saw the mob thronging the docks. Of course she had no idea to what ends the Twentieth Century would come, the kinds of shallow relationships that would evolve as the family was annihilated by television, automobiles, the entire technological epidemic. She had her vision of families perched on packing crates. Irish, Poles, Italians, Arabs. Plump girls with dark-eyed babies, apple-cheeked young men in short-brimmed hats carrying their heritage in a sack. Strangers mingling, becoming lovers and companions. She never noticed that it all had changed.’ Magnusson attempted an emphatic gesture, but the effect was of a palsied tremor. ‘It’s terrible! The petty alliances between people nowadays. Worse than loneliness. There’s no trust, no commitment, no love. I’m so fortunate to have Laura.’

Laura beamed and clasped her hands at her waist, a pose both virtuous and triumphant. Magnusson studied the backs of his hands, as if considering their sad plight. Several of his fingers had been broken and left unset; the nail of his right thumb was missing, exposing a contused bulge of flesh. Jocundra was suddenly ashamed of her presence in the room.

‘Perhaps it’s just my damned Swedish morbidity,’ said Magnusson out of the blue. ‘I tried to kill myself once, you know. Slit my wrists. Damned fool youngster! I was discouraged by the rain and the state of the economy. Not much reason, you might think, for self-destruction, but I found it thoroughly oppressing at the time.’

‘Well,’ said Laura after an uncomfortable silence. ‘We’ll let you rest, Hilmer.’ She laid her hand on the doorknob, but the old man spoke again.

‘He’ll find you out, Jocundra.’

‘Sir?’ She turned back to him.

‘You operate on a paler principle than he, and he will find you out. But you’re a healthy girl, even if a bit transparent. I can see it by your yellows and your blues.’ He laughed, a hideous rasp which set him choking, and as he choked, he managed to say, ‘Got your health, yes…’ When he regained control, his tone was one of amusement. ‘I wish I could offer medical advice. Stay off the fried foods, take cold showers, or some such. But as far as I can see, and that’s farther than most, you’re in the pink. Awful image! If you were in the pink, you’d be quite ill.’

‘What in the world are you talkin’ about, Hilmer?’ Laura’s voice held a note of frustration.

‘Oh, no!’ Magnusson’s bony orbits seemed to be crumbling away under the green glow of his eyes, as if they were nuggets of a rare element implanted in his skull, ravaging him. ‘You’re not going to pick my brain anymore. An old man needs his secrets, his little edge on the world as it recedes.’

‘Ezawa thinks he might be seein’ bioenergy… auras.’ Laura closed the door behind them and flexed the lacquered nails of her left hand as if they were blood-tipped claws. ‘I’ll get it out of him! He’s becoming more and more aroused. If his body hadn’t been so enervated to begin with, he’d already be chasin’ me around the bed.’

Laura went down to the commissary to prepare Magnusson’s lunch, and Jocundra, in no hurry to rejoin Donnell, wandered the hallway. Half of the rooms were untenanted,, all furnished with mahogany antiques and the walls covered with the same pattern of wallpaper: an infancy of rosebud cottages and grapevines. Cards were set into brass mounts on the doors of the occupied rooms, and she read them as she idled along. Clarice Monroe. That would be the black girl, the one who believed herself to be a dancer and had taught herself to walk after only a few weeks. Marilyn Ramsburgh, Kline Lee French, Jack Richmond. Beneath each name was a coded entry revealing the specifics of treatment and the prognosis. There were two green dots after Magnusson’s name, signifying the new strain; his current prognosis was for three months plus or minus a week. That meant Donnell would have eight or nine months unless his youthfulness further retarded the bacterial action. A long time to spend with anyone, longer than her marriage. The Thirty Weeks War, or so Charlie had called it. She had seen him a month before. He had cut his hair and trimmed his beard, was deeply tanned and dressed in an expensive jacket, gold chains around his neck, a gold watch, gold rings… the petered-out claim of his body salted with gold. She smiled at her cattiness. He wasn’t so terrible. Now that he had become just another figment of the French Quarter, working around the clock at his restaurant, clinking wineglasses with sagging divorcees and posing a sexual Everest for disillusioned housewives to scale, he bore little resemblance to the man she had married, and this was doubtless the reason she could now tolerate him: it had been the original she disliked.

She had been standing beside Magnusson’s door for less than a minute when she noticed her right side - that nearest the door - was prickly with… not cold exactly, more an animal chill that raised gooseflesh on her arm. She assumed it was nerves, fatigue; but on touching the door she discovered that it, too, was cold, and a vibration tingled her fingertips as if a charge had passed through the wood from an X-ray machine briefly in operation. Nerves, she thought again. And, indeed, the cold dissipated the instant she cracked the door. Still, she was curious. What would the old man be like apart from Laura’s influence? She cracked the door wider, and his scent of bay rum and corruption leaked out. White hallway light spilled across shelves lined with gilt and leather medical texts, sweeping back the darkness, compacting it. She leaned on the doorknob, peering inside, and the sharp shadows angled from beneath the desk and chair quivered, poised - she imagined - to snick through the blood and bone of her ankles if she trespassed. Feeling foolish at her apprehension, she pushed the door wide open. He sat in his wheelchair facing the far wall, a dim green oval of his reflected stare puddled head-high on the wallpaper. The uncanny sight gave her pause, and she was uncertain whether or not to call his name.

‘Go away,’ he whispered without turning.

A thrill ran across the muscles of her abdomen. His head wobbled and his hand fell off the arm of the chair, half a gesture of dismissal, half collapse. He whispered once more, ‘Go away.’ She jumped back, pulling the door shut behind her, and she leaned against the doorframe trembling, unable to stop trembling no matter how insistently she told herself that her fright was the product of stress alone. His voice had terrified her. Though it had been the same decrepit wheeze he had spoken in earlier, this time it had been full of potent menace, the voice of a spirit speaking through a cobwebbed throat, its whisper created by the straining and snapping of spider silk stretched apart by desiccated muscles. And yet, for all its implicit power, it had been wavering and faint, as if a wind and a world lay between them.