“Tell them if that’s what you want to do. Phone the newspaper. I can’t stop you. Tell everyone about this damned mark on me.”
“It’s a shadowgraph. I’ve read about them. It’s probably caused by a brilliant flash of light.”
“Is that what it is?” Lazarus almost laughed. But not quite. “Hell, I thought it was my punishment.”
“Maybe I’m your punishment,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I blame the red dress for everything.”
Everything,
as in over?
Everything,
as in just beginning? He didn’t sound as angry. Only sad. Lost. I knew what that was like. The black trees, the path that can’t be found. The ice, falling like stones from above.
The beetles were clicking, and so was my brain. Always my task: undo what has been done. I wanted to whirl time backward, clothes off, lights cut, door open, car on the road.
“I feel him there every minute of every day,” Lazarus said. “I know what it is. Whatever you want to call it. It’s my punishment all right.”
In the story of the fearless boy, the foolish hero played cards with the dead and walked through graveyards without fear, but not even he carried a dead man on his back. The burden of that was an impossible weight. I knew what that was like, too.
Lazarus turned to me. He was barefoot and we were standing on the porch. That alone terrified me. The
then
and the
now
slammed together. His white shirt was wet from his soaking wet skin.
“Aren’t you going to ask? You wanted to know, so go ahead. Ask me.”
All things happened this way, didn’t they? Every story, every life, every coincidence. A left turn instead of a right turn. A stomp of the feet. A wish said aloud. A branch falling from a tree. A storm sweeping in from the east. A butterfly. A candle. A match.
When I didn’t ask, he decided to tell me anyway.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.
As it turned out, I wasn’t so different from my brother when it came to the truth. I felt as though I were about to fall, headfirst, down into the tunnel from which there was no return.
I know I asked, but tell me later, tell me tomorrow or never. That’s soon enough.
Lazarus sat on the top step of the porch. Out in the orchard something was flying around the tops of the trees. There were bats here, too. There was my car, unwashed, dusty, the mileage piling on since I’d begun driving here and back. If I was going to stay, he was going to tell me.
I sat down next to him. I got a splinter — just my luck — but I kept my mouth shut.
Seth Jones, the real Seth Jones, the one with the library cards, had worked on this orchard all his life. He’d been born here and this had been his father’s business before him. He was a good son who did as he was told, even after his father had died, even after he himself had gone through middle age. He was so cautious that his life had nearly passed before him and he’d barely noticed. What had he to show for all those years? The oranges he grew were delicious, the land mortgage-free, the workers he hired were honest, and he himself awoke in the mornings, shoulders and legs aching, but alive and well all the same. Maybe that should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
Seth Jones, the real one, the true one, wished more than anything that he could change places with someone. He wanted not to be himself. He wanted to travel to countries he’d read about, dreamed of all his life.
One year, and he’d give up half of what he owned.
And then it happened, the way things do, when it’s least expected: a temporary worker from the hardware store, a young man of twenty-five, strong, healthy, a lost soul who’d been running his whole life. A foster child, always temporary, always on the move. The young man’s shoes were worn down; he had never saved more than a hundred dollars, enough to get to the next town. Twenty-five and he was exhausted. Too many states, too many roads, too many women. He was fed up with life. He dreamed about permanence, stability, trees with roots, land that didn’t turn to sand under his feet and slip away.
One afternoon, on a day like any other, he delivered a truckload of mulch, one job of many. Temporary, of course, already fading. But this time he didn’t get back in the feed-store truck and drive away. He walked through the orchard, drawn by the scent of oranges and water. He stood at the edge of the pond. He thought about drowning himself, but he knew at the last instant the human spirit always fought to live. He’d spent his whole life traveling, doing as little as possible, getting by. Still, he had his youth, his beautiful face, his strength. Surely this should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
Seth Jones saw the stranger fall to his knees. The young man looked as though he was praying, when really he was cursing this world. He was a good man, Seth Jones figured, perhaps sent from above. Surely this was a sign, a man praying for guidance. Seth Jones went right up to the stranger and offered him a bargain no man with just a hundred dollars in his pockets could refuse. One year, not a day more, and in return, half of everything. They shook on it then and there.
The stranger quit his job. He packed up his motel room. He didn’t have much, so it didn’t take long. On the arranged day, he took a taxi out to the orchard. Everything was set in place: Where to call to hire the farmworkers. Where the checkbook was kept and how to manage Seth Jones’s signature. What was a reasonable price for a bushel of oranges, a crate, a truckload. No one would have to see the stranger; he would be Seth Jones while the true Jones was in Italy. That was where his travels would begin. As for the stranger, he felt like someone’s son. Maybe that was his dream: a son who had inherited half of everything, as far as the eye could see.
It was a humid day and there were storm clouds. The earth was damp. The air barely moved. So much the better to leave for one man. So much the better to stay for the other.
They were walking through the orchard when it happened. There were blackbirds calling. The air was fragrant. Each man felt as though he’d been given a year to do with as he pleased, the opposite of his own life. The final step of this exchange: they traded shoes. The new man put on the old work boots worn for fifteen years, so comfortable he could wear them from dawn till midnight. Seth Jones put on the younger man’s walking shoes, light on his feet, shoes that would carry him far away.
The bad weather must have been a hundred miles off. West. North. Nowhere nearby. Or so it seemed. Then it happened the way things do, when it’s least expected. Lightning hit. It tore a hole in the ground. It struck the stranger so hard that his heart stopped. He was floating above himself, and he stayed there, hovering, until he came to himself in the hospital morgue. When he tried to speak, to ask about the other man, smoke came out of his mouth. It was amazing he hadn’t been burned alive, that’s what he heard the nurses saying. No matter what the experts said about rubber soles, he figured the traded boots were what saved him. But he couldn’t figure much beyond that. He was still hovering in some way.
In the hospital he saw the dark, branchlike splotches on his arms. All he could think was that he had to get away. When he stood up from the bath, dripping with ice, he heard them gasp at the marking on his back. It was a burn shaped like a face, someone guessed. A wound shaped like a man. But that wasn’t what it was. He knew exactly who he carried: the man to whom he owed a year.
He got dressed and refused any further medical care; he heard those same nurses refer to him as Lazarus. Since he barely remembered his own name, he decided to call himself that as well. What was death like? For him it was a cloud, and he awoke from it clouded still. Where had he been? He had lost himself, and then he was back. If he thought hard, there may have been a battle. He could halfway remember charging through the bath of ice in some way, fighting to come back, slamming down and then arising.
He left the hospital as soon as he could — they had no authority to hold him, he didn’t appear to be a danger to himself or others, and he had a bargain to keep. As soon as he returned to the orchard he found the exact spot where he’d been hit. The hole in the ground. The oranges turned red. And then he noticed it, what he was looking for. A pile of ashes. Lazarus got down on his hands and knees and breathed it in. Sulfur and flesh. His partner had been struck and had burst into flame. This was all that was left, a pile of ash and minerals, this and the face imprinted on his back.
Lazarus swept the ashes into a dustpan, then funneled it all into a wooden box he’d found on the bookshelf. He didn’t once think of leaving; he kept his part of the bargain. Seth Jones had outlived most of his friends, and Lazarus avoided those Jones had known through his business, hiring workers over the phone, doing his banking by mail and phone. Every night he walked through the orchard to the place where the oranges had turned red. He had made a deal for a year; now he was forced to carry his partner forever more. When the anniversary of that day came, he could feel himself wanting to move on. It was in his blood, that’s what he’d discovered. He was never meant to be a settled man. But now he was living another man’s life, trapped by circumstance. When did a promise end? With the sort of guilt Lazarus had, the answer seemed to be never.
Lazarus took me back inside; I followed him to the bookshelves. There was the wooden box, carved in Morocco, a death box, a burden.
“Do you think I killed him?” Lazarus said.
It could have been anyone who delivered the mulch that day, but it was him. Anyone who stomped her feet on the porch, but it was me.
I held the wooden box; it was surprisingly heavy, amazingly so. We carried it out through the orchard; it seemed only right that we take Seth Jones with us now. The darkness was sifting through the trees. We went out to the pond, where Jones had first seen Lazarus, the moment when he thought his wish had come true. We left the wooden box and our clothes in a pile and went wading into the water. It was cool and deep. Nights in Florida weren’t any more comfortable than the days, only wetter, more humid, closing in, throwing you together. I held Lazarus in my arms. It didn’t matter what his name had been; he was Lazarus now. I could feel everywhere he’d been, all those towns, those women, that life. I could feel that he’d made a wish he now regretted, that he’d give anything to have his own shoes back, his own life.
For once in my life I didn’t consider the
what had happened
or the
what would be
. None of that. The nowness, the darkness, engulfed us. Two drowning people who loved the feel of water.
Kiss me underwater. Kiss me until I’m gone.
I could feel a shudder go through Lazarus. How odd to have the truth there with us, right there in the black water, drifting. Hot night, beetles flying low, lightning in the distance.
I was far above myself. Floating in the dark. No fear for once in my life. It was not at all what I’d expected. That fearless moment. Salvation where it didn’t belong.
I could feel Lazarus shivering in my arms. “It’s not your fault,” I told him.
And here’s the thing I would have never believed about words, my own words, spoken aloud, the ones I said to give him comfort, hope, all those things I’d never believed in: They rescued me.
CHAPTER FIVE
Gold
I
I’d stayed away all weekend and on the
way home I worried about Giselle. It was Monday, late in the afternoon, nearing suppertime. The cat would be waiting at the door, desperate to go out; perhaps she’d already ignored her litter box, choosing to defecate in one of my shoes instead, as she often did to vent her anger. I’d left out a huge bowl of food, but my guilt grew by the mile. As I was driving home I thought I heard her mewling, which was impossible.
When I reached the town line, the blue welcome to orlon sign decorated with oranges and palm trees, I thought I heard Giselle screaming. She’d done that once or twice, when she’d spied another cat through the window, some supposed enemy or lover.
It was only a siren I was hearing — I saw the ambulance in my rearview mirror — but the sound had done its work. My irregular heart was pounding against my ribs. I pulled up in front of my house and got out. It was fairly good weather for Florida, almost crisp, no humidity. No storms. None in sight. All the same, the hair stood up on my arms. I could feel something wrong up and down my spine. I was like a human weather vane, only for tragedy. I had that sour taste in my mouth and I hadn’t even made a wish.
I ran up to the door and let Giselle out. She was angry with me, had her haughty expression on, her tail up; she went past me and jumped around in the weeds. She turned her back to me to pee. She was a private creature and I respected that. She held a grudge; I respected that, too.
I wanted to go inside, take a shower, put on some clean clothes, reconsider my life. I thought perhaps I’d discovered the difference between love and obsession. Only one of them puts you in jeopardy. I felt like a gambler who had only just realized how much there was to lose. Everything seemed different. The steps I took, the scratchy weeds against the bare skin of my leg, my cat mewing.
Giselle trotted past me to the door. She had something in her mouth. I hoped it was a bird, not another poor mole. I chased after her. She shook her prey back and forth. It was brown, whatever she’d caught: feathers or fur, I couldn’t tell.
Giselle rubbed back and forth against my legs, then deposited her catch at my feet. No longer angry that I’d been gone so long, proud of herself. She had given me a gift. I suppose she was my pet — and I, her what? Surely not her keeper. Perhaps I was her pet in return. Her little murderess. Her darling dear.
I bent down, cautious. The thing at my feet didn’t seem familiar. And then, it was.
It was a leather glove. When I peered inside I saw flecks of gold.
I ran back across the lawn. I found the other glove under the hedge. It was curled up like something broken, a leaf, a bird, a mole, a heart.
Monday. The day after I was supposed to have met Renny to finish his architecture project. I’d forgotten.
I went into my house, through the living room, into the kitchen. The Doric temple, unfinished. The gloves on the lawn. My irregular heart. My greedy self. My wish that he would disappear.
I heard someone call my name. The voice was unfamiliar. I charged back through the house and saw a young woman on my front porch.
“Hullo,” she called.
I peered through the screen door.
“I had a message from Renny Mills,” the woman said. She was young, blond, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She looked somewhat familiar.
“You have a message for me?”
“No. For me. Renny left me a note to meet him here. We were in art history class together in the spring.”
Iris McGinnis.
She laughed, nervous. She was thin and pale, with a sweet expression. “He said he had a present for me. I don’t know why he’d want to give me anything.”
Because he’s madly in love with you, idiot,
I wanted to say. I opened the screen door. She was very young. Nineteen, perhaps. I had a terrible sinking feeling.
“He’s been making you something,” I said.
“Me?” Iris laughed, and the sound was like water. Maybe that was what he’d fallen in love with, that sound.
“But he’s not here.”
“Okay, well, can you have him call me?”
Iris wrote down her phone number on the back of a piece of notepaper.
“I’ll be home all day. Studying. I’m not as smart as Renny is. He got an A in the class we took together and I was lucky to get a C. I’ll just wait for his call.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I can’t believe he has a present for me.” She had green eyes, I noticed. She was pretty in a pale, sweet way.
When Iris left I phoned Renny’s dorm. Someone answered and, when I asked for him, said, “You haven’t heard?”
I felt panic-stricken. I had the gloves on my bureau. My hair was sticking up as though I’d been shocked.
“What did he do?” I asked. I knew it was something bad, something desperate, a monster’s attempt to tear off his skin, an angel’s attempt to rise.
I pieced it together from that initial call and then a call to my brother. Everyone in the Science Center knew. Renny had walked into Acres’ Hardware Store and taken a hatchet from the wall. He’d been calm and cheerful; no one had even noticed him. Now there was so much blood on the floor of the hardware store that new oak planks would have to be installed. Renny would have surely bled to death if the manager of the paint department, the man who’d been attacked by the bulldog, hadn’t taken a lifesaving course. The manager was a quick thinker; he’d been so ever since his own attack. He jumped over the counter and made a tourniquet out of the strings of his Acres’ Hardware apron.
Because of the incident, and the university’s liability, the lightning-strike study was to be disbanded. There hadn’t been enough psychological supervision, that’s what Renny’s parents were saying, and it was rumored that a lawsuit loomed. Orlon University had no vested interest in the study. Twelve years of research was to be poured down the drain; all those photographs of us, the charts of our poor health, would be shredded now.
Everyone I spoke to wondered why on earth someone would commit such a horrible act, right there in the hardware store on a perfectly ordinary day. But I understood why Renny had tried to cut off his hand. I was sure that when he walked past the girls at the checkout counter and smiled at them, they hadn’t bothered to smile back; like all those students at Orlon who walked right past him, they most likely hadn’t even seen him. Renny walked through the store, the invisible man, with one thought in mind. I knew him well enough to know that. A single desire, his defining secret: he wanted to be human.
I went immediately to the hospital, found the intensive care unit, and talked myself into the waiting area. I knew a few of the nurses, and I was clearly upset and involved. I wasn’t family, and therefore couldn’t see the patient, but they would allow me to wait. For what, I wasn’t certain. I sat down on one of the hard plastic chairs.
I suppose I was easy to pick out if someone had heard about me: lightning-strike victim, distraught friend, fellow monster in disguise. A teenaged girl came to sit next to me. “You’re Renny’s friend,” she said. She introduced herself as his sister, Marina.
“Will he recover?” I asked.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.” Marina had a soft voice, like Renny’s. She wore a black velvet headband that pushed back her hair. I suppose she was a redhead, but her hair looked white to me. A little old woman, concerned about her brother. He’d told me she was the smart one. The favorite. “They had to sew the hand back on, reattach all the nerves. He may not feel anything. Or maybe he’ll just feel less. But mostly he lost a lot of blood.”
“I was supposed to help him with a project. That’s why this happened. I forgot all about it.”
I felt that I should get down on my knees and beg Marina’s forgiveness. I should cut out my heart and place it on the vinyl tiles of the floor.
“The Doric temple? It wasn’t for class. He was already failing when he asked you for help. He wanted to create something to give to some girl he’s in love with.”
“Iris,” I said.
“Is she worth it?” Marina asked.
“I don’t know. I only met her today.”
Renny’s parents had gone to collect his personal belongings from his dorm room. They were meeting with their lawyer as soon as they got back to Miami. They might not have appreciated someone from the lightning-strike study visiting Renny, but Marina took me to see him.
“It’s not that my parents wouldn’t like you, it’s just that they’re protecting him from the world. Parents.” Marina shrugged. “They want the best and do the worst. I’m just holding my breath till I’m on my own.”
When we reached Renny’s room, I peered in from the doorway. There he was. Under the sheets. Eyes closed. There was some machine that made a sound like snow falling.
“Knock, knock,” Marina called. No reply. “Demerol,” she whispered to me. “He’s been out for a while.”
She led me in to see him. The room was darkened and we could see the flecks of gold in his hands. He had no idea of how beautiful he was, none at all.
We went to stand by the bed.
“It’s okay,” Marina said. “You can talk to him.”
“Hey.” My voice sounded faint. It echoed as though I were far away when I was right there. “It’s me.”
Renny opened his eyes. He didn’t turn away from me the way I thought he would. That was something.
I saw a line of red along his left arm — the line where they’d sewed him together. I saw it — that amazing, sharp, and painful red. It had been so long since I had seen the color that I was nearly blinded. I had forgotten its intensity.
“I wanted to be normal,” Renny said. “I wanted to feel things.”
“You’ve got a funny way of being normal,” I said.
His parents would take him home, and Marina would bring him cups of tea and bowls of broth until he recovered. One day someone would see him for who he really was and fall in love with him.
“What should I do with your project?” I asked.
He smiled. He had a great smile. “Not much call for Doric temples. Throw the fucker out.”
“Actually Iris came for it.”
“Who?” he said.
We both laughed at that. Girl of his dreams. Maybe it would be better now for her to stay there.
“I was a lousy friend,” I said.
Renny was a gentleman, even now, drugged-up and in pain. “There’s worse,” he said.
“Who, a mass murderer?”
“Me,” he said.
I leaned down and kissed Renny’s forehead. “Thanks,” he said to me. I think that’s what he said. He was already falling back asleep.
“He’s tired,” Marina said.
Her hair was red, I could see that now. I blinked and was still stunned by how beautiful the color was. When I got my bearings, I wrote down my address. “Will you let me know how he’s doing?”
I felt that I had dreamed him up — Renny was that honest and that true.
“Do you think it’s possible for him to be happy?” she asked.
She wasn’t much more than a girl.
“I think anything is possible,” I said. It sounded as though I meant it.
I left, back into the heat of the day. I was walking across the parking lot to my car, thinking about love and why it mattered. It was an idea, wasn’t it? Nothing real, nothing lasting, nothing to live or die for. In all the talks I’d had with Jack Lyons, I’d never once asked him what he thought about love. I hadn’t wanted to know.
The clouds were moving quickly in the sky. There was so much blue and there was the color I’d missed the most moving across all that blue. So startling. So alive. It was a cardinal flying above the treetops. I stood there with a hand over my eyes. After so much time, even the smallest amount of that color hurt my retinas. I think I felt tears.
I heard something. Renny’s sister running after me.
“Hold on,” she called.
I turned and waited for her to catch up.
“Renny said you’d take care of this.”
Marina held out her hands and I held out mine. She turned over the little mole Renny had rescued from the cat. It felt like a glove, a leaf, a wish.
“What’s going to happen to him?” I said.
“I’ll take care of Renny. When he’s better he’ll go to the University of Miami. Art history. Or did you mean the mole?”
I hadn’t, but I supposed I should be interested in the poor thing; he was my responsibility now.
“If you can’t find grubs or earthworms, Renny said to feed it American cheese and lettuce. Twice a day.”
It was nothing I wanted. Nothing I cared about. But mine all the same. I held the mole up and looked into its blind face. And then I realized what love did. It changed your whole world. Even when you didn’t want it to.
On the way to my brother’s house I saw flashes of red everywhere. I suppose I was recovering. Or maybe I was hallucinating, imagining what I wanted most to see. The sign on the mini-mart flashed so deeply crimson it took my breath away. Had such ridiculous things been beautiful before and I simply hadn’t noticed? I stopped, pulled into the lot, went inside the market, to the fruit aisle. Wrapped lettuce, cucumbers, peaches, lemons, and then, at last, a single pale apple, blushed on one side as if filled with life, with blood. I bought the apple and ate it in my car. It was delicious, all the more so because of its color. Sitting in my parked car, I felt absurdly alone without Renny. I’d gotten involved, even though I’d known it was always a mistake.