assumed a fencer’s position in the hall, En garde. ‘I’m out here, and I won’t hurt you,’ he said, hand outstretched. ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s okay.’ He knew, could feel it as a tangible fact, that the bedroom was empty, but he could still hear the sobbing through the door.
Slender lines of darkness gathered in the periphery of his vision like smeared ink. As he tried to focus, they blended into corner shadows like wisps of spider web. Still, outside his direct gaze, the smudged lines flashed toward the bedroom door, wriggling like dark, blurry eels anxious to get in.
I’m having a stroke, just like Phil.
But he did not feel ill. Physically he was fine; it was the house, the bedroom, that was not fine. It was the bedroom that was crying.
Peter was not a coward. He knew that about himself. He could feel fear and still act, but what he felt now was not fear; it was an unwillingness to learn, and that was very different. Some things that you discover – infidelity, the death of loved ones – you cannot turn back from. What you suddenly know changes you, chops you up into little pieces.
He did not want to learn what was in the bedroom.
Still, he poked the door open with a stiff finger. He leaned slowly into the bedroom and fumbled to push the button switch.
The ceiling fixture slowly glowed to sterile yellow brightness. Shadows fled across the bedroom like little cyclones of soot. Peter grabbed the door jamb.
A woman stood at the foot of Phil’s bed. She had buried her face in grey hands, but Peter could tell who she was by the dark comma of bobbed hair and the honey-silk quality of her weeping. ‘My God,’ he said, and his shoulders slumped. He let out his breath and started to smile. ‘Lydia. You scared me.’
The woman’s hands dropped. She turned, head cocked, listening; slowly turned and listened some more, as if to far-off and unpleasant music.
All of a sudden, through his relief, Peter’s tongue moved involuntarily, and he bit into it. His head exploded in pain. Eyes watering, gasping, he felt vulnerable and very, very foolish. Through his tears, he saw that the woman’s face was like a flat sheet of mother-of-pearl. Her eyes opened to quizzical hollows. Less than solid, she resembled a paper doll frayed by careless snipping. Peter could actually see her edges ripple. Trying to back out, he thumped against the door, closing it, and for an instant felt something tug at his head, his throbbing tongue, his nerves.
Her blank and empty eyes vibrated. They seemed to point not quite in his direction, but through and beyond him. The image filled out like a balloon, assuming a counterfeit and temporary solidity.
Not Lydia. But it looks like her.
The image moved its lips. As if pushing through gelatin, the sound arrived late at his ears. ‘Phil, how could you do this, how could you just die?’ came the high-pitched silken wail, only a little louder than the buzzing of a fly.
The eel shadows swooped through the door and into the bedroom like descending hawks. He could feel them brush his shoulders like the tips of cold, damp fingers. The figure jerked in a horrible simulation of fear, trying to escape, dodging faster than flesh, like a bad film edit. But escape was impossible.
Peter’s mouth went stone dry. He wanted to look away, block his vision with a hand. Instincts old and deep instructed him that he was about to bear witness to something private, a sight no living human should ever have to see; but he could not stop himself.
He stared. Pity held him. And curiosity.
The eel shadows swarmed and lanced and worried the image, snatching away scalloped bites and crumbling pieces. It lifted its hands in weak defense, shuddering with an astonishing, dry simulacrum of pain. Whatever it was, its time had come. As the likeness of Phil’s ex-wife diminished and deflated, its wailing turned tinny and desperate. It unraveled drastically, peeling and dissolving in shreds like a tissue-paper cutout dipped in a bowl of water. In a few seconds, the last of its murky outline disintegrated and fell away. Sated, the shadows fled, draining like water around his feet. The room seemed to shiver off the last of them, leaving just the bed, neatly made and undisturbed, and the threadbare carpet and empty shelves.
The image, the delusion, the reflection or copy of Lydia – whatever it might have been – was gone. Peter leaned his shoulder against the door jamb. He could not move. For the moment, he could not even turn his head. Blood pounded in his ears. His calf cramped and he gritted his teeth. Even in his worse days of besotted grief, he had never seen anything remotely like this.
Pitiful, something left behind, dropped like an old Kleenex.
His heart slowed. The heat behind his eyes cooled. Finally, he had to blink. That instant with his eyes closed terrified him and he felt his neck tense and intestines curl.
Nothing came. Nothing touched him. Quiet and still. The room was innocent.
Nothing had actually happened.
Nothing real.
Peter was finally able to turn. He put out one foot as if rediscovering how to walk, then another, and slowly left the bedroom, reaching back with numb and inept fingers to close the door. The hangers caught. He could not close it all the way, so he angrily slammed it. The hangers jangled. One fell and bounced off the wood floor with a tinny resonance. The whine of the hanger wire made him grit his teeth, it sounded too much like the voice.
He gave up and walked on what felt like tingling stumps to the couch in the living room. Sat on the couch with hands folded on his lap. Did not even try to relax. Watched the carnival of the city across the water, darker now in the wee hours. His neck knotted and stayed that way.
He was still alive and wasn’t sure he wanted to be, not if he had to think about what he had just seen.
Peter watched the dawn light gather slowly over San Francisco, then burst forth along the eastern hills, reflecting gold against skyscrapers and banks of fog, the most beautiful sight of all: day.
He was making a big, grown-man decision. There was only one way to react – it must have been a bad dream – and two things to do. He walked into the kitchen and poured himself a bowl of Cheerios, chewing reflexively each milky mouthful. The milk had been in the fridge since Phil’s death and was on the edge of spoiling, but served well enough.
He forced himself to take a shower in the big bathroom, removing his clothes with catlike caution, climbing into the claw-foot tub, and drawing the curtain around on its pipe, tucked inside just enough to keep water from spraying on the floor, but with a clear view of the open bathroom door. This took tremendous will but it had to be done, and just this way. The water was set hot and stung his back. Phil did not believe in wimpy showers; no water inhibitor valves for him.
No Bergson valves.
As Peter scrubbed using Phil’s rounded block of Ivory soap, he tried to recall what a Bergson valve was. Something he had picked up reading The Doors of Perception in the sixties.
This is the end … beautiful friend.
Aldous Huxley. Something about drugs opening doors, or was it spigots? Letting the taps of reality flow free. He’d look it up when he got home. Or maybe Phil had a copy.
After toweling dry, he dressed in the living room, putting on his good
