Icarus

ELEVEN

Jack Keller often thought about the exact moment when he realized he had not died. It was when he heard four short and simple words. The most basic and unpoetic of questions:

"Can you hear me?"

And, yes, of course he could. It was a woman's voice, clear and sweet as could be. A tiny bit hoarse but so soothing and gentle. The voice warmed him, made him glow inside. But he didn't know who was speaking. He couldn't see her. And she sounded so far away. Who was she? That's what he remembered wondering. She seemed so nice. So familiar…

"Can you hear me?"

He thought he'd answered but maybe he hadn't. Yes, he said, I can hear you. But who are you?

"Jack, please tell me you can hear what I'm saying."

Yes, yes, yes. I said I can hear you. Why can't you hear me?

"Then just listen to me, Jack."

Why are you doing this to me? Why can't you understand what I'm saying? And even as he screamed the words, he knew the answer: Because I'm saying nothing. It's all only in my head. I'm not speaking, I'm thinking. I'm not making any noise. But why not? How can that he? What's happening?

"You're going to be all right, Jack."

That's when he recognized the voice. The wonderful voice that comforted him as strongly and physically as if it were a cool hand pressed against his feverish forehead. It was Caroline. How could he not have recognized her? And why couldn't he see her? Where was she? Where was he?

Suddenly the voice became a whisper, and it was so close by he could feel her magical breath warming his ear.

"You have to be all right, Jack. Do you understand? I need you to be all right."

He felt her holding his hand, squeezing it in hers. He couldn't feel any other part of his body, it was as if the rest of him didn't exist, but he could feel the pressure on the back of his hand, feel her thumb digging urgently into his palm.

"I love you. I love you now and I will always love you and I need you to be all right so I can show you just how much I love you."

He tried once again to answer her but he couldn't. And then he couldn't hear her anymore either. It was as if he were being covered in a thick fog. He tried to reach for her, tried to bring her back, but there was nothing there. She was gone and he was alone.

It was only much later that Jack Keller decided there were just two things that had kept him alive.

One, of course, was Caroline. Of that he was absolutely certain.

For she had returned after that first visit. Many times. Both in Virginia and in New York, after he was able to be transferred. And every time he felt her near him, he became stronger, more determined to fight whatever it was that was pinning him down and trying to smother him. When she was by his side she would hold his hand and touch his cheek, whisper to him, will him on and beg him to endure the agony because there was still so much pleasure ahead of them. To coax him into the future, she would talk about the past, about the time they'd spent together, and, although he still couldn't see her, he knew by her words that she was smiling and that she looked as beautiful as she could look, which was quite beautiful indeed.

"Do you remember the first time we made love?" she asked. And, yes, he most definitely remembered, every little detail. It was not possible to forget something so sublime, but he enjoyed listening to her tell it; the remembering made him happy, as if they were able to make love once again, after all these years, for the very first time. "I was so nervous," she went on. "But a different kind of nervous. Not a virginal nervousness, God knows, that was hardly the case, but I'd never made love with anyone when I knew it was so important. It wasn't just a date and we weren't just having sex, we were testing out the viability of our permanence. It doesn't sound very romantic, I know, but that's really what I thought, even then. And it was romantic, because somehow I knew that you were thinking the same thing. And if I didn't please you or somehow you were disappointed, well… I didn't think I'd be able to bear it. The idea that you wouldn't please me was inconceivable. I was so mad for you. Could you tell? No, probably not. Or maybe just a little. I didn't let on, at least not too much. I was afraid. Although I couldn't even tell you what I was afraid of. Maybe I was already afraid of how much I was in love with you.

"Do you remember? We went back to your dorm room. And you'd put candles all around. You'd bought a good bottle of wine. French, very ritzy. Put on Joni Mitchell. You didn't even like her, but you knew I did. And do you remember how we talked? How we knew we were there to make love? It was definitely going to happen, so there was no rush, and we just talked and talked for hours and hours. Lying on your bed, sometimes touching, sometimes not. And then there I was, lying up against you, in your arms, and we were still just talking until I kissed you. I couldn't stand it anymore; I just had to do it. Then I put your hand on my breast, I remember that. And then your hands were everywhere. So gentle. So sexy. We kissed and touched and made love and listened to Joni Mitchell and we didn't stop until sometime the next morning. I can still remember everything. Not just remember but feel. Every touch. Every kiss. It was fun, wasn't it, being young…"

Another time she came and sat and stroked him and talked about the first time she was pregnant.

"I hardly gained any weight and I know that deep down you didn't think there was really a child in there. But there was, and when I told you I thought it was time, when I was in such pain, remember how terrified you were? You kept making jokes and acting so blasй but I knew you were afraid for me, afraid it would hurt, afraid something would happen. I thought you knew right from the beginning that it had all gone wrong. And I remember you said you wished you could go through it instead because you knew I was so scared of the pain. I thought that was the sweetest thing I'd ever heard, you wanting to take my pain. And in a way you did because in the room, I can still see you, you were in such agony watching me. Here I was, trying to have this baby, and I just kept saying to you, 'It's okay, I'm fine, it's not so bad,' trying to comfort you. I can still remember your face when… when we knew. The doctor told you, spoke directly to you, and I knew it was devastating but you were staring down at me, making sure I was all right. I'd never had anyone look at me that way. I remember when I was a freshman, before I knew you, I broke my arm. Riding in Central Park. I needed an operation, had to have pins put in, kind of a big deal. And I called Mother and Daddy to tell them. I thought at least one of them would fly up to New York to, you know, take care of me. I remember, when it was time to get off the phone – by then I knew they weren't even thinking of coming up – Daddy said, 'Call us after the operation and let us know how you feel.' I didn't say anything, but I wanted to say, 'No! You call me!' But they didn't. I never had anyone who thought to call me until I met you. Only you wouldn't just call, you'd be there. And if you could, you'd even hurt for me." She was quiet for a little bit. Jack could hear her breathing. He couldn't tell if this memory had made her sad or happy or both. When she spoke again, it was with a new tenderness, but also with a quiet sense of regret. "I used to think that maybe it was right that we never had children, Jack. We were so much in love with each other, maybe we wouldn't have had enough left over for anyone else. I used to think that we had a finite amount of love in us – not just us, people, I mean. All of us. That we could use it up and when it was gone we wouldn't have enough for anything else, anyone new. When you can talk, Jack, I want you to tell me if that's true. If we're all in danger of running out of love…"

Yes, he knew that Caroline had kept him going. And it wasn't just her love. Or her patience. When he listened to her talk – about them, about the restaurants, about the life they'd shared – he understood that they were not just friends or lovers or husband and wife. They were partners, had been since they'd first met, in everything, and he knew he couldn't just disappear and leave her alone. It made him strong. And it made him fight. He couldn't end the partnership by up and dying on her.

There was another thing, too. A second thing that had saved him.

It was what Dr. Feldman told him.

When the pain was excruciating. When he realized that pain couldn't possibly get any worse.

That came after the period when he didn't know the difference between dream and reality. Even now, he wasn't exactly sure how long that period had lasted. Days, perhaps. More likely weeks. He heard voices sometimes, garbled sounds that pierced his thick fog. And he saw faces, bending over him, standing above him. Occasionally he felt things. Poking. Or movement; once he was sure that someone was turning him over. Another time he felt as if someone was walking him around a room, manipulating him as if he were a marionette. He tried to speak sometimes. Often he thought he was speaking. But no one ever seemed to understand him.

At some point, the fog began to lift. He was not yet anchored to the real world but he could, from time to time, touch down upon it. He would drift. Couldn't stop. Suddenly, there would be a flash of color, and with a start he would realize that he was looking at the back of his own flesh-colored hand. It was paler than he remembered, but it had texture. And it was startlingly vivid. He watched his fingers move and he could tell they were part of him, and somehow it seemed miraculous that wherever he was, whatever had happened to him, he was able to think, somewhere in the recesses of his brain, Move, and his fingers would follow instructions. They would wiggle and bend, they would obey, before he fell back into his fog, exhausted and drained.

Soon after, the jumble of noises around him turned into words. Then, occasionally, sentences. He kept hearing the word "accident" and realized it was referring to him. After the accident, he heard. Or: Since the accident… It's a result of the accident… The trauma of an accident like that… And he wanted to scream, What are you talking about? It was no accident. It was not an accident! It was human savagery, unleashed and unfiltered. But it took more time before the sounds that came out of his throat began to be heard and understood. The first time he said the word "thirsty" and someone appeared, a black woman, dressed all in white, to pick up his head and give him a drink of water, he wept; tears of relief streamed down his cheeks.

Every few days, something new began to come back to him. Then it was every day, and soon, hour by hour. The room came into focus. Details were remembered – words and numbers and places and names.

But when reality came flitting into Jack's new world, so did the extraordinary pain.

First they would make him move while he was still in the bed. Turn him over, gently twist his legs and his arms. The nurses would explain what they were doing. "Don't want to get thrombosis," one of them would say. Then when another one came to move him the next time, it would be, "This is so we don't get a pulmonary embolism. We don't want a stroke, do we?" Jack didn't give a shit if he got a stroke. He certainly didn't give a shit if she got a stroke. All he cared about was that the pain go away. Because it flooded his entire being and dominated every waking moment and made him yearn for blessed sleep and, yes, even death.

He was forced into a wheelchair as soon as he regained consciousness. "You've got to be mobile," a nurse would tell him. And all he could think was: Please, let me die so I don't have to feel any more pain.

Jack knew he'd never forget the surgeon's words, not as long as he lived, because they changed everything. Good old Doc Feldman – well, not really so old, a year younger than Jack. And already the best orthopedic surgeon in New York City. Jack had been transferred back to New York, although he didn't remember any of the movement or the flight, as soon as he was stable, and placed in the intensive care unit of the Hospital for Special Surgery on East Seventieth Street. Feldman had performed a shoulder operation on Jack years before – nothing too complicated, a torn rotator cuff and bone spur – but he did a wonderful job and after that he began coming to the restaurant. He was usually with an attractive woman and once or twice the four of them – Feldman, his date, Jack, and Caroline – socialized. The life-changing words came when the doc was making his hospital rounds and saw his patient and friend lying there, unmoving. He leaned over the bed, didn't touch him, no attempt at bedside manner; a soothing demeanor was not important to Andy Feldman. He didn't even check to see if the still body lying flat on the mattress was awake. Just said, very matter-of-fact, "I know you don't feel it, Jack, but you're lucky. Because the human brain is a remarkable thing. It can't do what you want most right now. It can't prevent pain; nothing can do that. But it does something almost as good. It won't remember pain. I promise you, it won't allow you to ever, not even for a moment, remember what you're feeling right now."

That's when Jack knew he'd truly survive, understood that he'd make it. If he'd been told that the agony was permanent, thought for a minute that he'd wake up a year later, two years later, anytime later, and there it would still be, unchanged, enveloping him, invading his body, he would have killed himself.

Once Jack knew that he would live, he could allow himself to return to the past. The opening in Charlottesville. The fight in the restaurant. Running toward the stairs and rushing into the upstairs office. He could let that remarkable brain remember what had happened to him. As it did, the world began to make a little more sense.

And then all sense was taken away from him.

At first he didn't believe them. They were lying. They had to be. But they were so calm, so sure of themselves. So understanding and so pitying. So unrelenting.

They told him over and over again until he began to believe. They showed him newspaper articles and a Talk magazine story. They even had Dom come and say, yes, they were telling the truth, then he'd put his head down on Jack's chest and sobbed and sobbed.

And then Jack knew.

Caroline had not cooled his fever with the touch of her hand. She had not urged him back to life with her loving whispers. Those were the drugs, they explained. He'd been hallucinating. She had not been beside him in the hospital at all.

Because that night, the night of the accident, that final sound he'd heard before he'd passed out, that most distant of the explosions… it had not been in the distance. And it had not been an explosion.

It was a gunshot. A fourth shot, after the ones that had sliced through his hip and knee and abdomen and ripped him apart.

More human savagery. Meant to destroy. To erase. To kill.

No, there was no more sense to the world Jack returned to. Because he had indeed been lucky. He had survived his wounds.

But Caroline had not.

She had been shot once, in the head.

And then picked up and thrown through the office window.

The shot had killed her, he was told. She was dead before the two-story fall down to the bricks below.

That news did not surprise Jack, when he was conscious and able to absorb it. He knew the shot was meant to kill.

Just as he knew what the fall was.

A message from someone who knew about his past.

A warning.

From someone letting him know what his future would hold.