Encased in his bubble, he watched them ease the thing over the inflatable’s edge. He thought he saw it flail an arm faintly, thought he saw it kick. But it was barely recognizable as a human body. Scraps of colorless clothing hung from it, the lips were big as balloons and eyelids swollen completely shut, limbs withered to a clawlike shape. He followed procedure and kept all frequencies open. Seconds passed. The panel crackled silence.
Then, “Jesus,” he heard. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
One of the Patrol clippers had veered close. The inflatable rocked in its wake, filled with frogmen and the crusted white mannequin thing.
“God,” he heard, “is there a doctor in the house?”
Then: “Sure thing, Tarzan. Jesus. Jesus Christ. It’s a girl.”
*
I stop. Fiddle with pencils. Scratch my neck. Stand and pace. Outside, it is dark. I see it through blinds: no more twilight, only late night, wind trapped between hills and the Bay, car headlights splintering by, occasional wall-hushed metallic creaks, and lights of the trolleys.
Reluctantly, like a slave crawling back to the temple gods, I slouch into my swivel chair. Adjust the lumbar rest. Save the document, which for easy future reference I name
Angelita,
fret about whether it is a short story or a fictionalized documentary, or a lie, or the truth, or the start of something more and something larger, or maybe just one of those fragments that spins through me, then leaves abruptly, an end in itself. There’s not much more I can do with it tonight, in any case. The actions I’ve chosen today, the news life has dealt, the people I love, have left me too tired. I press more buttons, hear more beeps. Lights flash, red and green. I print it out. Travel on to other things.
Write:
I got Chick’s letter today, telling us about Bren. Feels like it has undone me. She was weeding the garden on Sunday, Chick says, fell down, never got up. A stroke, they told her. Uncontrollable blood pressure; medication didn’t work. Apparently she’d had the condition for quite some time, and just kept it to herself.
But she went almost immediately. A quick blow. No more pain. Never regained consciousness.
I will miss her the rest of my life.
Stunning wash of grief, Chick said; she is still just beginning to feel
it all out. And one thing she knows she’ll feel sooner or later is this anger—that she did not have time to say good-bye—but then, how many of us ever do? She knows, after time has passed, that there will be minutes and hours of gratitude, too, for the years of marriage she shared with Bren, and for all the years of love.
Lucky warrior, my Bren, she wrote. To go so swiftly. Do you think, little loves, that she’s there with the light?
*
I’m tired. Too full of a desire to avoid these tears. So I save this other document, shut off the machine, and think about cleaning up—the house, and myself—for Babe. Who will be burned out, cranky, wanting to be touched.
We’ll call Chick. Visit her, the three of us. Or, if she’d rather, have her come west for a while. But it’s late, now, back east; and the fact that she wrote rather than called implies a need for distance.
We’ll call her in the morning.
In the meantime, it occurs to me, there is this story to tell. Of what happened to all of us, and the life that continued for some of us, in the wake of the storm called Angelita.
*
I remember something Babe told me once, years ago. It was during her residency; she had met a Tibetan monk. He was visiting a terminally ill patient in the hospital—a fellow Buddhist and Tibetan in exile, who had had a very rough life, had seen his entire family murdered by the invading Chinese, had fled Tibet and staggered across the Indian border in the middle of winter, half alive, to eventually lead a menial and impoverished existence, first in South Asia, then in America.
The monk told Babe the tale of his own life, as well: He, too, had suffered in the Chinese invasion and occupation, had at one time been interred in a so-called reeducation camp where he was beaten, starved, and tortured. In fact, during one torture session his interrogators drove a short nail into his forehead. He had the scar still. It had taken a long time to heal. Had become infected, and racked him with fever. For a while, delirious, he was sure he would die.
In this instance, he said, his own religious practices had helped immeasurably. He had tried, as much as he was able in his delirium, to visualize the after-death state, the between-lives intermediate state of
Bardo,
to control his own fear. And, in a moment of feverish clarity, the thought came to him: that the instructions regarding how to conduct oneself during the process of dying, and in the after-death state, were applicable, also, to one’s conduct during life.
Then—inexplicably, though prepared to die—he had gotten better. His fever subsided. His forehead wound healed. The Chinese soldiers, deciding he was of no further use to them, let him go.
Babe pressed him for details. It might, she told him, be of help to her in her medical practice. Because, as a doctor, she dealt with diseases of the mind as well as the body; and her patients were more often than not the dying.
How might an individual’s life be improved if he or she could abolish the fear of death? Or, rather, of the process of dying? Knowledge of this would be beneficial; too few even thought about it.
Would she, for instance—dedicated as she was to the healing of the body and mind and to the abolition of suffering—know how to conduct herself properly at the time of her own death?
She doubted it.
The Tibetan examined her face for a long time. So long, Babe said, that she could feel herself break into a sweat. His forehead was wide, with a single deep-dug cicatrix left by the nail right above his broad nose, between the small lively black eyes. His age was difficult to discern. His hands were gentle, stroking wooden rosary beads. Finally, he smiled quietly at her.
Oh, you will, he said. You will, you will.
*
Our lives are short, but also very long. So there’s never just one story; there are many, so many. We cannot be the vessel for them all.
I’ve written about Babe here, and Bren, and others; but there’s lots more. The truth is that we haven’t always been sharing partners in each other’s lives. It’s probably more accurate to say that, off and on, we found each other. Sometimes the search was elating; at other times, exhausting. It gave and took.
But that’s another story.
I will say one thing; Babe is the person standing in this little room of my life with me.
It is a room that sometimes contracts and seems to crush, sometimes expands infinitely, like the uncontained pool of my long-ago visualized dreams. If she were not here, I would stand in it alone. Which would maybe be okay. Anyway, it would be what it would be. More often than not, I’m thankful for her presence. I mean I’m lucky, and grateful, for the company and the love.
Although, I know, there will be this time when even a lover’s companionship becomes impossible.
We have to be alone for final journeys. That way, we travel light.