White Apples (3 page)

"Coco, look at me for Christ's sake! What is that? What is that tattoo?"

She said nothing and still did not move. For a moment Ettrich thought she was dead. He had seen her impossible tattoo and some•how his seeing it killed her. But that was insane. He wanted to go over and touch her. He also wanted to get dressed as fast as he could and get the hell out of there. "Coco!"

Finally she lifted her head and turned it slowly in his direction. She opened her eyes and looked at him. "What?" "What is that tattoo? Why do you—"

She mumbled something he couldn't understand. It sounded like she was talking in her sleep.

"What? What did you say?" He took two steps closer to her. He had to. He had to know what she was saying.

She spoke louder. She sounded annoyed. "I
said
it was your dream. You know who Bruno is." Putting a finger to the back of her neck, she rubbed it up and down over the name there. Just that gesture made Ettrich do a whole-body twitch.

"But why—but how did it get on your neck? It wasn't there before. I know you never had it before today."

Coco pushed herself into a sitting position and looked at him. "That is correct. It's brand-new. Chocolate-covered God, Vincent. Remember that part of your dream? The part where you said you were not very religious?"

He froze. The woman knew his dream!

She reached over to the night table and picked up her pack of Marlboro Lights cigarettes. Pulling one out, she lit it from the yel•low candle. The light in the room flickered as the small flame went from the table to her hand and back to the table again. She took a long drag and, letting her head drop back, blew the smoke in a thin gray line toward the ceiling. "Sit down, Vincent. Come smoke with me. You like to smoke." She looked at him and smiled.

Obediently Ettrich went over and sat on the corner at the foot of the bed. What else could he do? He wanted to say everything but could think of nothing to say.

"Come closer. I want to touch you." She motioned him over with her cigarette hand. He shook his head, closed his eyes. "No, here is fine."

Slowly she lay back down and looked at the ceiling. Taking a drag off the cigarette, she tried to blow a smoke ring but it didn't form well. "How long have we known each other?"

She was so calm. Ettrich's world had just imploded but she was asking how long they'd been
dating,
for Christ's sake.

"A month and a half, two months. I don't know. Tell me about the tattoo, Coco. Please."

"I will but first you must listen to me carefully, Vincent, because what I'm going to say now is very important. All right?" Her large eyes moved slowly to his. Her expression demanded his attention. He nodded.

"Good. Do you remember your life before we met?"

The question was so peculiar and out of place that he wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly. "Do I remember my
life
? Of course I remember it." Anger like a blowtorch flared in his chest. What was this bullshit? "Why wouldn't I remember my life?"

"Then do you remember the hospital? Do you remember all the time you spent in the hospital when you became sick?"

"
What?
"Ettrich had the constitution of a dray horse. He was never sick. Once a year he caught a mild winter cold that usually lasted three days and gave him the sniffles. Sometimes he took an aspirin for a mild headache. Nothing else—even his teeth were healthy. The only rea•son he ever went to a dentist was to have them cleaned.

"What hospital? I was never in the hospital!"

"You don't remember Tillman Reeves or Big Dog Michelle?"

"Big Dog who? What are you talking about?" As soon as he asked that question, a picture slowly filled Ettrich's mind like thick liquid pouring into a glass. It was exactly that sensation—his brain slowly filled with the image of ... a black man's disease-ravaged face looking straight at him and laughing. The man's teeth were yellow and large. His cheeks and eyes were very sunken but he was laughing.

Standing behind him was a BIG black woman wearing a white nurse's uniform. On her breast was a red nametag: Michelle Mas-low, RN. She was smiling too but sternly, as if against her better judgment. Like a high school principal who's caught bad boys up to no good. Her size and the blazing whiteness of her dress were in severe contrast to the shrunken man in bed in front of her. Where she emanated health and strength, he looked more dead than alive.

Hands on her massive hips Nurse Maslow announced, "Now I
know
you made up that nasty nickname for me, Professor. Mr. Vin•cent Ettrich is a gentleman. He's not an ungrateful
hamster
like a certain Professor Tillman
Reeves."
Her voice was stentorian and mag•nificent. She could have ruled the universe with that voice.

His jolly albeit gravely ill eyes never leaving Ettrich, the man in bed barked. "Woof. Woof. Big Dog's in
da house."

The nurse made an exasperated face and went tsk tsk tsk. "You keep it up like that and see what happens. A squeaky little hamstuh is all you are. Not like your very nice roommate here. Just because you're sick, Professor, doesn't mean you can be rude to your nurse."

Reeves's smile grew wider. He said to her over his narrow shoulder, "Just because I call you Big Dog Michelle does not mean I respect you any less, Nurse Maslow.
Au contraire.
One of the great experiences of my life has been meeting Cerberus before I die. I only wish I'd known you were a she and not a he all these years. In his
Theogony,
Hesiod said Cerberus had fifty heads, but having had the pleasure of your inimitable company all these weeks, I know that your one head is sufficient, madame."

She crossed her arms. "Fifty heads, huh? Well, you know what? I looked up that Cerberus you're always talking about. That's right. And if you're saying I'm the dog that guards the gates of hell, then you better watch out because I got a whole lot of bitin' teeth!"

"Woof."

She leaned forward as if about to reply. Her face broke into a big smile. Watching her, Ettrich realized she wasn't fat at all, just strapping. Her bare arms were packed with muscle. He was sure she could probably pick either of them up with no trouble.

And then the tent collapsed. That's what it felt like when Vin•cent Ettrich began to die. His whole being felt like a tent, a big circus tent, and someone jerked away the poles that held it up. His life collapsed like that tent while Michelle Maslow and Tillman Reeves laughed. It was more amazing than frightening because it happened so fast. He could not breathe. All at once everything stopped working—his mouth, his throat, his lungs. From one second to the next all of him just shut down. No gasp or cluck or choke even; a hand fluttering up for help. Because he was finished. Life left him a moment before he realized he was dying. Watching two nice people laugh, Vincent Ettrich died.

Of course things went black. Of course there came a total void. But it was palpable, tactile. It felt like he was standing in a small closet with the lights off. It
felt.
That's right: Now dead, Ettrich could feel. And as that astonishing realization sunk in, light came on again in a blinding blitz, like a flashbulb going off straight in his eyes.

"Congratulations, Vincent. It's about time you started seeing these things. Here's a souvenir for you. Hopefully the first of many."

The light still blinded him when he felt something being put into his hand. Hand. He had a hand. He could touch. He could
feel.
Slowly he looked down and felt/saw what had been placed there: a small square. A piece of paper, a photograph. Vision returning, he was gradually able to decipher the image there. When he did, his head reared back like he'd inhaled ammonia. Because it was a photograph of what he'd seen the moment he died: Tillman Reeves and Big Dog Michelle facing him and laughing.

Ettrich looked up from the photograph and realized he was again in Coco's bedroom, still sitting naked on the corner of her bed.

"Finally! I was beginning to lose hope." She sighed bluntly and got up from the bed. Without looking at him she padded across the floor and left the room. A few moments later he heard her pissing into the toilet next door. The sound of the flush and then a short burst of water in the sink. She came back into the bedroom and stopped. She looked at him, clearly amused.

"I died?" He almost couldn't say the word, the hard "d" at the beginning, the hard "d" at the end. "Yes, Vincent, you died."

"I'm dead?"

"No, you
were
dead. Now you're alive again. Look around. Just like before. Your life continues."

He was shaking his head. He didn't realize it for a while. "Why? Why did I come back to life? Why can't I remember dying?" His voice was so small. It felt like it came from somewhere very far away but it came from him. Even his voice was betraying him now. At once, everything he had ever known made no sense at all.

Standing a few feet away, Coco took her hands off her bare hips and turned them upward as if to say "I don't know."

"Then who are
you
? At least tell me that."

She danced her head from left to right and back again—a silly little gesture. "I'm Coco the underpants girl." "Please don't joke around. Who are you?"

"I'm your lover. Your treasure. Your treasure map. X marks my spot. You saw." She touched the back of her neck where Bruno Mann's name was written. "I'm here to keep you honest. Your guardian angel." She sang the title line of the song "Someone to Watch Over Me." "I'm all of the above and none of them. I'm here to help you find your way through all this, Vincent." And in a slight, silvery voice she added, "The moment you saw me for the first time in my store that day was the moment you were reborn. That's why I asked if you remembered your life before we met."

It was unbearable, too unimaginable and ghastly to absorb. Et•trich felt like puking. He put his face in his hands and tried to drag his sanity back into the corral. "I died? I died but came back to life, this
same
life?" He said it more to himself. He needed to say it out loud to hear how it sounded. Jerking his head up, he cried out to this woman and to God, "Then why don't I
remember
? Why don't I remember dy•ing? Or being dead? How's it possible not to remember that?"

Coco squatted down like a baseball catcher ready for the next pitch. "You were in the hospital for a month with liver cancer. In the end they moved you into a room with Tillman Reeves who was also about to die. He called himself Tillman the Terminal. Big Dog watched over both of you."

Ettrich shouted, "But I don't remember that! Nothing! How can it be? How is it possible?" He thought he was going mad. "And I do remember things from before I saw you. I remember what I did that day. I remember putting on my clothes that morning ..."

She shook her head. "No, you're making it up out of the life you used to know. The old days, Vincent. All those thousands of Tuesdays and Fridays and holidays and rainy days when your heart was still beating. You were sure you had all the time in the world. But you're scared now so you're just putting your hand into that sack and pulling out old memories."

The part that stuck was her saying, "when your heart was still beating." Ettrich had been about to say prove it—show me what you're saying is true. He was going to cross his arms, throw out his chin, and say "Prove it." But she stopped him with that phrase "when your heart
was
still beating." Past tense.

His left arm was leaning on his knee. He slowly turned it over. He put two fingers of his right hand on the inside of his left wrist and felt for a pulse. He did it while she spoke, hoping she wouldn't notice.

There was no pulse. He pushed harder with his fingers, search•ing. Nothing. He had no pulse. He put his fingers to his throat and felt for it there. Nothing. "When your heart was still beating." Vin•cent Ettrich's heart had stopped

beating.

He began to shake. He shook like someone in the last throes of a terminal disease. His teeth chattered and he could not stop them. His sanity was drowning, barely clinging to a small piece of the wreck that until an hour before had been Vincent Ettrich— successful businessman, philanderer deluxe, satisfactory father, casual vegetarian, etc.

Face in his hands, eyes tightly closed, elbows on his knees, Ettrich began to rock back and forth. Without being aware of it he was making a sound—a kind of high humming or groaning. An almost inhuman sound that began in the pit of his stomach and rose sinuously up to his mouth and out into the world. It was fear and grief and desperation transformed into noise. Even Coco seemed disturbed by the eerieness of the tone, the pitch.

"Vincent."

He ignored her and kept keening. Face hidden, he rocked his body back and forth like a mad Jew at prayer. "Stop wasting time. Pay attention to me."

He didn't stop. Fuck her! Wasting time? His entire being had just been given a cosmic enema but she was telling him to pay attention.

He heard gasps, catcalls, laughter, street sounds. So loud and close that he had to see what was going on. He opened his eyes just as a yellow cab passed nearby, splattering him with viscous puddle water. He leapt up. He had been sitting on a curb two feet from a snarl of rushing city traffic. He was still naked. The nightmare we all have at one time now surrounded Ettrich: the one where we alone are naked in the middle of some downtown city street. Every•one else around us is properly dressed and staring.

People were certainly staring at Ettrich. Staring, pointing, hoot•ing. A few feet away, Coco Hallis stared at him too with furious eyes but she was naked too. Despite everything that had just hap•pened, everything he had just learned, Ettrich still self-consciously covered his package with his hands. That made the crowd laugh and jabber even more.

A handsome thug in a brown leather jacket walked over to Coco and after looking her up and down appreciatively said, "Hey, baby, I'm buying whatever it is you're selling."

Ignoring him, Coco asked, "Are you ready to pay attention now?" "Hey baby, don't be rude. I'm talking to you."

Coco turned slowly to the guy and said just loud enough for him to hear, "And now I'll talk to you, Bernie. You made two women pregnant but you won't take any responsibility for the chil•dren. You've never even seen them. You didn't go to your mother's funeral, and the woman you're sleeping with these days, Emily Gal•vin, is doing it a lot with another guy when you're on the road. Would you like to hear more?"