Boundaries (15 page)

"I’m very sorry, Mr. Case. Your sister is dead. She was murdered."

Silence.

"Did you hear what I told you, Mr. Case?"

Nothing.

"I must ask you to come back to Batavia, sir, to identify your sister’s body."

"Murdered? My sister wasn’t murdered. She lives alone. She’s always lived alone. She can’t help it. People upset her.
Things
upset her. No one murders a creature like her. Who would
want
to murder her? You’re mistaken. You’re simply mistaken. Murder happens to people who are . . . obtrusive. She isn’t. This person, this body you’ve found; how was it murdered, Mr. Kenner?"

"I can understand your reluctance, sir—")

It was the injustice of it, after all. Like killing a child, like putting a knife into a child again and again and again.

~ * ~

It is the very minute of Anne’s murder and she knows that her killer stands not far away and that she cannot escape him. She has tried escaping him before. When his intention was not to murder her but to overpower her, to rape her.

"Hello, Anne," he says now. "I think you were expecting me."

She says nothing. She will not acknowledge him. She will not give him that satisfaction.

She hears the closet door slam against the wall. She flinches. She does not turn.

Moments pass.

She stares hard at the dying leaf of the
Dracena
, at the pathways of the veins; she sees that they change, from green to red to brown.

She knows this man wants her death. He’s told her so. ("You can’t help it, Anne, my love. I’m going to murder you someday. I
need
it!")

He says now, "I have a knife, Anne."

She sees the dying leaf of the
Dracena
very clearly. She puts her hand on a small, white ceramic watering can near the
Dracena
. She sighs. Both she and the plant are going to die, she knows. She whispers, "Let me. . ." but does not finish the sentence—
Let me water my plant
. She feels that it’s a ludicrous thing to say, now, and she does not want to appear ludicrous in front of this man.

"Let you what, my love? Let you live?"

She says nothing. She realizes that she’s shivering from fear.

He says, "You’re toying with me, Anne."

Her eyes water. She wants to plead with him, but she can’t. It will do no good, she realizes.

He growls, "Don’t toy with me, Anne!"

What can she do? She turns her back completely to him. She makes an offering of herself. Then, desperately, though for only a moment, she wants a field to run in, open sky. It’s a memory from childhood. She understands this. She pities herself for it.

She knows that her death is at hand.

"And what if I told you that I loved you, Anne?"

She smiles a little. She thinks,
Of course you don’t. How could you love anyone?
Then, all at once, she feels the life, like wakefulness, slipping quickly from her. She gasps. It does no good. This surprises her, frightens her; all her life her breathing has worked.

But it doesn’t work now.

Her gasp is no more than a sound.

The air stops at the back of her throat, then the
Dracena’s
dying leaf sweeps past her and the dark hardwood floor comes up.

She’s in a wide tunnel.

A bright and friendly light shines at its mouth.

She moves happily toward the light.

D
avid threw his blanket and sheet off, swung his feet to the floor, stood.

And grew suddenly dizzy.

He crumbled, caught himself with his hands, so he was on all fours on the gray linoleum. "Damn!" he whispered. He should have realized. He’d been in bed for—what?—five days? Longer? Of course he was going to be weak. He had to give himself time.

He sat back on his haunches, so his long arms hung limply at his sides. He realized that he could not stand. An edge of dizziness floated in his head like water, and it started a hard pellet of nausea in his stomach. He leaned forward again, arms crossed at his stomach, eyes closed. The nausea dissipated, though not completely.

He took a long, deep breath and rocked gently on his haunches. How very connected to this life he was—to his bone and flesh and muscle. His stomach fought him, his head fought him. It was not the way of things in the whole of the universe, he knew. There were places where gravity seemed to work in reverse, and where muscle and bone, foot and hand might easily be creations of the soul and of memory.

He stopped rocking. The nausea was returning, it grew in his stomach like an egg.

He rocked.

The nausea retreated.

Eventually, he felt that he could stand. He pushed himself slowly to his feet and stood very unsteadily for a few seconds. Then, all at once, he found himself sitting on the bed, his heart pumping hard and fast, his head lowered.

He asked himself,
Why do I want to go back? For Anne?
He could not answer it concretely. He thought that of course it was for Anne. To find out why she had been the victim of such obscenity. He needed to know the answer to that question as much as he had needed anything in his life—as much as he had needed air on that hot afternoon five years ago, when the lake had closed around him and tried to suck the life from his body.

But—it was obvious—if he went back, he might not return.

Was that all right? Did that agree with him? Did it soothe him?

He didn’t want to think so. He wanted to believe that he wanted one adventure—this life—done before he launched himself into another—the next.

He stood. Quickly, he realized that his legs and head and stomach were going to go along with his idea of leaving the hospital.

~ * ~

In one of the other cities on the Other Side, a man sat eating a green salad in his small, well-lighted apartment. The salad was without dressing, but the man had always preferred it plain and he ate it hungrily.

He was alone in the apartment. The walls were light blue, the ceiling white plaster, the floors bare wood. The man had lived in the apartment for a very long time.

He wore a gray sports coat and tattered brown pants. He was shoeless. His hands were long and thin and he kept them scrupulously clean. He sported a three-day growth of beard, however, and had been giving thought to letting the beard mature, though it was not what concerned him now.

As he ate, he thought about the names that he’d been recording in his notebook. And he thought about the dreams.

The names came to him from many sources. He was a man who was well liked and much spoken to, and there were many people who knew what he was doing in the apartment. So they shared the names with him (though they didn’t use the word
names
; the names were
words
, primarily, though some people called them
symbols
, and others called them
manifestations
). They shared their dreams, too. Like people everywhere, they were interested in knowing themselves better, and they supposed (as the man had suggested) that the names and the dreams were reflective of their inner selves, not merely—as so many believed—reflective of "those on the horizon," which, the man thought, was simply so much superstition, on a par with the widely held belief that there were lives
after
this life. He believed otherwise. He believed that there had been a previous life.

He finished his salad and took his wooden bowl to the sink to wash it. He turned on the faucet, waited a moment while the pipes in the old building clanged and cursed, and at last a spurt of water belched out, hit the bowl and splashed onto his pants. He backed up, though it was too late. He looked down at himself.
Well, I can’t go outside like this
, he thought.
It looks like I’ve peed my pants
.

He also had many books in his library. Those that weren’t self-written were donations from friends. He had pored over these books many times, always struck by the similarity between what they recorded and what people had shared verbally with him about their dreams. "But these are not dreams," he had decided, meaning—though he had could not have verbalized it—
these are not fictions
.

He changed his pants and left the room. The stairs to the ground level were long and poorly lit and they moaned ominously. (There were many rooms and apartments in the building but most were uninhabited; most of those that were inhabited were underground. Many people preferred such apartments, though he couldn’t imagine why. "I feel more at home underground," these people said.)

When he reached the bottom floor, he went out, onto the street.

It was full of people. Some walked quickly in the bright, early morning light, and he recognized them because they were always the same people. They moved with their heads down and their arms close to their sides, their eyes apparently unmoving. Once, he had asked one of them, "Where are you going this way?" (meaning so quickly and with so little attention to the surroundings; it was, as far as the man was concerned, a very strange way to move about in this beautiful place). That person had stopped suddenly and had given the man a quick and startled look. "I’m going to the countryside. Picnic. Hike," he said, and then had continued walking.

The man knew what picnics and hikes were. He’d been on many picnics and had taken many hikes. But the point was that the countryside would always be there and rushing to it with one’s head down neglected the beauty of the city.

Another person had said, "But there is no time." It was a very odd thing to say. What was
time
?

He thought now, as he walked, of the book he had read the previous evening. The book had been given to him by a woman who lived in his building. It spoke of many things which other people had spoken of; but it also spoke of something new.
Famlees
. And, in the same sentence, it referred to
mutherfahthr
, sons and
dawters
. This, in itself, was not wonderfully new. Several of the other books had spoken of
phauthors
or
fathrs
, or
fahthers
, and of
mawthers
(
mothers,
muthars
) which he felt confident were the same as
mutherfahthr
. (They also spoke of
mahmahs
and
dadees
, though he had guessed that there was no connection.) But the book took all the others a giant step further. It linked
mutherfahthr
, sons and
dawters
under the collective word
famlee
.

"
Theze
r
famlees
," the book read. "And
tha
r
guod
comfertibel
,
distent
." He knew what the woman meant at once, because as soon as he’d read the words his skin tingled a little and he felt warm. And the word that came from him often came from him then: "Shannon." And like all the other times the word had come from him, it carried with it a feeling of contentment and peace. But there was something else, too. Something that had never come to him before when he had mouthed the word—the mental image of a woman with red hair, large eyes, straight nose, lips slightly parted. This face lingered in his head for a long while, and then very slowly dissipated, like a morning mist.

It occurred to him then that the word Shannon had something to do with that woman. Perhaps it described her, somehow—had to do with her total self. She was
Shannon
which meant that she had red hair, large eyes, et cetera. Perhaps it meant that she brought him, particularly, the kind of warm and tingly feeling that he had first felt the night before, when he had come across the word
famlee
. He dwelt on these ideas as he walked.