Mystery

Tom was aware of a feeling of great lightness and harmony, then that he no longer felt any pain. Some heavy force had held him down, and this force was desperately trying to haul him back into an enclosure too small for him. His sense of lightness, of freedom from gravity gently but relentlessly pulled him upward. The hooks and eyes and sticky fingers that wished to hold him back popped free one by one, until the last of these stretched out like a filament, wanting him back. The filament grew taut, and he nearly feared its snapping—he felt an uncomplicated wave of love for everything that wanted him back. The membrane released him with a final, soft, nearly impalpable pop and his love for all earthly things doubled and overflowed, and he knew, having lost the earth, that love was identical to grief and loss.

His tears washed his eyes, and he saw.

Down there beneath him was a man, then almost immediately another and another, bending over the body that had been his. Radiating out from the circle made by the leaning men and the prostrate boy was an expanding circle of chaos. Crumpled bicycles sprawled on the road like swatted insects, and overturned carts lay beside torn sacks of seed and cement. A horse struggled to right itself in front of an enormous white fan of spilled flour; another horse plunged through the stalled traffic and into an open stretch of road. Cars with running boards and cars with ornamental spare tire covers atop their trunks, cars with exhaust vents and ribbed chrome tubes and chrome latches, cars with statuettes of women stretching tiptoe like dancers on their hoods, stood in a disarranged confusion, pointing every which way as their headlights picked out the new arrivals working their way toward the damaged body he had just left and the other body, that of the man killed beneath the cart.

The world yearned toward invisibility, Tom saw, invisibility was the final condition toward which everything aspired.

He saw two teenage boys standing half-hidden in the crowd on the sidewalk. Running from them, he had felt mortal fear—how odd it was to remember that! They were not evil, not yet. Tom could not read their minds, but he saw that these two boys of fourteen, Nappy and Robbie, one so blubbery he had breasts and the other lean as a starved hound, lived at the periphery of a great cloud of error and confusion; and that they daily moved deeper into the cloud, and then he saw that they had made this cloud, produced it out of the choices they made, as a squid produces ink.…

If they had caught him, they would have pressed their knives against his chest, his throat; they would have enjoyed his terror but somewhere—even now—been shamed by it, and this shame would have formed another layer among a thousand layers that formed the inky cloud … and then Tom sensed or saw such ugliness that he turned away—

and saw that someone had covered him to the chest with an old green army blanket, and several of the men turned their heads to look out for the approach of an ambulance, which would be driven, Tom saw, by a chain-smoking elderly man named Esmond Walker. The ambulance was two-and-a-half miles away on Calle Bavaria, racing through the traffic with its siren whooping, and Tom heard the siren and knew that the sound would come to the waiting men in another eight minutes—

eight minutes

Tom looked down at the person he had been with some surprise, as well as with love and pity. His earthly self had been so new, so unformed and innocent. He had worked hard at his life with intent, innocent concentration, and his family would mourn him, his friends would miss him, there would for a time be a hole in the world that he had filled.

But the sense of lightness and harmony lifted him farther from the scene, and the patterns became clearer. At the epicenter of the confusion were two bodies, his own and that of the crushed man. Policemen in cars and policemen on bicycles had begun to arrive. Leading out from this crowded and unhappy scene with its flashing lights and calls for people to Step back! Let him breathe! was a gossamer trail only Tom could see.

This was the trail of what he would have done, where he would have gone, if he had lived. This trail of possibility was disappearing from the visible world, and what Tom saw was its disappearance.

He sees himself dodging through the traffic in a blare of horns and lights, sees himself running east, safe, on the other side of Calle Burleigh. Tom sees himself coming home to his enraged parents … and there his trail goes, glistening as it fades, from the steps of Miss Ellinghausen’s Academy of Dance where an older Tom stands beside a pretty girl named Sarah Spence and looks up, his face transfixed by a fleeting apprehension—that older Tom Pasmore looks up, his face almost melting with feelings he cannot understand, moves down the hard white steps outside Miss Ellinghausen’s Academy and vanishes long before he reaches the sidewalk. In a shabby room in the St. Alwyn Hotel, an even older Tom is reading a book called The Temptations of Invisibility, funny title, but he is not in the house on Eastern Shore Road, why is he in the St. Alwyn Hotel? Pain from an unlived future—what is that?

It had been three minutes since his death: the length of one of the songs on the radio to which his mother would listen with her head tilted, eyes half-closed, cigarette smoke curling up past her hair.

On Calle Burleigh a larger crowd packed the sidewalks, talking in a confused, ignorant way about what had caused all the trouble. A bike flipped right over, I saw it happen right there—one a’ them horses just got it into his head to go nuts, plain and simple—a boy ran out—somebody pushed a boy.

No, Tom protested, none of that was exactly right, you’re all wrong, it didn’t happen like that.

Music had begun playing some time ago, but Tom became aware of it only now: some song, he didn’t know what, saxophones and trumpets, and pretty soon the singer would rush on stage fiddling with his bow tie and plant himself before the mike and explain everything.…

In the end, music did explain everything.

The front doors of the houses on Calle Burleigh hung open, and the residents watched from their front stoops or their cement walkways or stood on the crowded sidewalk talking to each other. A big woman in a blue housedress caught his eye by jabbing her finger toward her side lawn as she said, Cornerboy, always trouble, I sent him back scared, made him run, those boys over there, who knows about them?

She pointed between the buildings toward 44th Street and carried Tom’s eye with her. On 44th Street no front doors stood open, and the only visible human being was a drunken fat man who sat smoking on the stoop of a brown and yellow duplex, wondering what he was going to do next.

Esmond Walker’s ambulance had turned off Calle Bavaria at the north end of Goethe Park and was beginning to move slowly through the stalled carts and leaning bicycles at the perimeter of the circle of disorder caused by Tom’s accident. Mr. Walker edged past a wagon piled with tanned hides, gave a nudge to a delivery van from Ostend’s Market that pulled up far enough to let him in, and changed the frequency of his siren from an ongoing whooping wail to a steady, more peremptory bip-bip-bip. He moved around two bicyclists who stared into the cab as if blaming him for the delay, tossed away his cigarette, and kept moving steadily through the crowd of vehicles slowly parting to let him through.

From his perch above the dissolving chaos, Tom heard the change in the siren’s signal, and the change of tone seemed to nudge him as certainly as the Ostend’s van, for the music began spreading out through the air around him, trumpets called, and the complicated scene beneath Tom darkened and fell away.

So that’s how it happens, he thought, and then he was moving fast down a dark tunnel toward a warm bright light. He was not moving his arms and legs, but neither was he being carried in any way. He seemed almost to be flying, but upright, as though supported by an invisible walkway. The music he had heard surrounded him like the sound of humming, or bird song almost too soft to be audible, and the air carried him and the music toward the distant light.

The tunnel had imperceptibly widened, and he was moving through a gathering of shadowy figures who radiated welcome and protection—Tom knew that he had seen these people before, that every one of them had been known to him in his earthly life, and that even though he could not identify them right now, he was deeply relieved to see them again.

Tom’s entire body felt full of light and the same feelings that had swept over him when he had jumped down from the milk cart. A delicious feeling of absolute rightness, of all worry having been thrown off, never again to be met, spread through him as he traveled through the protective crowd toward the light. Had he not always known these feelings? In some form? He thought they had been the deepest portion of his life, the most powerful but the least visible, the least known or understood, at once the most trusted and least dependable. They were the feelings caused by the sense of a real radiance existing at the center of life—now he knew that the radiance was real, for he was traveling toward it amidst people who loved him and wished him comfort and peace in his new condition, a condition he hungered for and needed more intensely with every inch of ground he flew over on his way to the light. For every inch meant an increase in clarity and certainty of understanding, and he felt like a starving man rushing toward a banquet.

Then a long filament attaching him to his old life caught him like a thrown hook, and he abruptly ceased to move forward. Another filament caught him. The people attending and welcoming him began to recede. Tom felt himself slipping away from the banquet of sense and understanding that had awaited him. He was being pulled back down the tunnel like a resistant dog, and the light shrank as it sailed away from him.

Then, for one shocking moment as he fell past his former perch in the air, Tom saw a black man in a white uniform sliding a stretcher into the back of an ambulance. Most of the chaos on the road had cleared, and horses and bicycles swerved around the awkward length of the ambulance to continue west toward Elm Cove. A dense knot of people remained on the sidewalk.

The hooks and eyes and filaments wrenched Tom back into his body so forcefully he could not breathe. He felt as if he had been slammed down hard on a concrete surface. Everything that had happened to him since he jumped off a milk cart erased itself from his mind. For a moment he thought he heard humming music; a light in the roof of the ambulance shone cruelly into his eyes.

Tom lost consciousness against a wave of pain.