rigors of restless sleep.
“Sir, I wish you’d say something,” I told him. “I really wish you would.”
Instead of obliging me, the radiologist lowered his hands from his face, turned, and walked out of the bedroom.
I glanced at the wall above the bed. Framed behind glass is a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine. It promises YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
Each morning, I begin my day by reading those seven words. Each night, I read them again, sometimes more than once, before sleep, if sleep will come to me.
I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning. As does death.
From a nightstand, I retrieved my cell phone. The first number on speed dial is the office of Wyatt Porter, chief of the Pico Mundo Police Department. The second is his home number. The third is his cell phone.
More likely than not, I would be calling Chief Porter, one place or another, before dawn.
In the living room, I turned on a light and discovered that Dr. Jessup had been standing in the dark, among the thrift-shop treasures with which the place is furnished.
When I went to the front door and opened it, he did not follow. Although he had sought my assistance, he couldn’t find the courage for what lay ahead.
In the rubescent light from an old bronze lamp with a beaded shade, the eclectic decor—Stickley-style armchairs, plump Victorian footstools, Maxfield Parrish prints, carnival-glass vases—evidently appealed to him.
“No offense,” I said, “but you don’t belong here, sir.”
Dr. Jessup silently regarded me with what might have been supplication.
“This place is filled to the brim with the past. There’s room for Elvis and me, and memories, but not for anyone new.”
I stepped into the public hall and pulled the door shut.
My apartment is one of two on the first floor of a converted Victorian house. Once a rambling single-family home, the place still offers considerable charm.
For years I lived in one rented room above a garage. My bed had been just a few steps from my refrigerator. Life was simpler then, and the future clear.
I traded that place for this not because I needed more space, but because my heart is here now, and forever.
The front door of the house featured an oval of leaded glass. The night beyond looked sharply beveled and organized into a pattern that anyone could understand.
When I stepped onto the porch, this night proved to be like all others: deep, mysterious, trembling with the potential for chaos.
From porch steps to flagstone path, to public sidewalk, I looked around for Dr. Jessup but didn’t see him.
In the high desert, which rises far east beyond Pico Mundo, winter can be chilly, while our low-desert nights remain mild even in February. The curbside Indian laurels sighed and whispered in the balmy wind, and moths soared to street lamps.
The surrounding houses were as quiet as their windows were dark. No dogs barked. No owls hooted.
No pedestrians were out, no traffic on the streets. The town looked as if the Rapture had occurred, as if only I had been left behind to endure the reign of Hell on Earth.
By the time I reached the corner, Dr. Jessup rejoined me. His pajamas and the lateness of the hour suggested that he had come to my apartment from his home on Jacaranda Way, five blocks north in a better neighborhood than mine. Now he led me in that direction.
He could fly, but he plodded. I ran, drawing ahead of him.
Although I dreaded what I would find no less than he might have dreaded revealing it to me, I wanted to get to it quickly. As far as I knew, a life might still be in jeopardy.
Halfway there, I realized that I could have taken the Chevy. For most of my driving life, having no car of my own, I borrowed from friends as needed. The previous autumn, I had inherited a 1980 Chevrolet Camaro Berlinetta Coupe.
Often I still act as though I have no wheels. Owning a few thousand pounds of vehicle oppresses me when I think about it too much. Because I try not to think about it, I sometimes forget I have it.
Under the cratered face of the blind moon, I ran.
On Jacaranda Way, the Jessup residence is a white-brick Georgian with elegant ornamentation. It is flanked by a delightful American Victorian with so many decorative moldings that it resembles a wedding cake, and by a house that is baroque in all the wrong ways.
None of these architectural styles seems right for the desert, shaded by palm trees, brightened by climbing bougainvillea. Our town was founded in 1900 by newcomers from the East Coast, who fled the harsh winters but brought with them cold-climate architecture and attitude.
Terri Stambaugh, my friend and employer, owner of the Pico Mundo Grille, tells me that this displaced architecture is better than the dreary acres of stucco and graveled roofs in many California desert towns.
I assume that she is right. I have seldom crossed the city line of Pico Mundo and have never been beyond the boundaries of Maravilla County.
My life is too full to allow either a jaunt or a journey. I don’t even watch the Travel Channel.
The joys of life can be found anywhere. Far places only offer exotic ways to suffer.
Besides, the world beyond Pico Mundo is haunted by strangers, and I find it difficult enough to cope with the dead who, in life, were known to me.
Upstairs and down, soft lamplight shone at some windows of the Jessup residence. Most panes were dark.
By the time I reached the foot of the front-porch steps, Dr. Wilbur Jessup waited there.
The wind stirred his hair and ruffled his pajamas, although why he should be subject to the wind, I do not know. The moonlight found him, too, and shadow.
The grieving radiologist needed comforting before he could summon sufficient strength to lead me into his house, where he himself no doubt lay dead, and perhaps another.
I embraced him. Only a spirit, he was invisible to everyone but me, yet he felt warm and solid.
Perhaps I see the dead affected by the weather of this world, and see them touched by light and shadow, and find them as warm as the living, not because this is the way they are but because this is the way I want them to be. Perhaps by this device, I mean to deny the power of death.
My supernatural gift might reside not in my mind but instead in my heart. The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs it, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth.
Dr. Jessup had no substance, but he leaned heavily upon me, a weight. He shook with the sobs that he could not voice.
The dead don’t talk. Perhaps they know things about death that the living are not permitted to learn from them.
In this moment, my ability to speak gave me no advantage. Words
