Bliss and Other Short Stories Part 6

"Like you almost did," I say. In the ensuing silence, I shake Ta basco sauce into the pot.

"Yeah. Well, not exactly. Anyway, I wanted to ask, do you think there's anything to it? All these people, the ones who've died or whatever, they all say the same thing afterwards. That they were in some sort of tunnel or hallway, moving toward a light, and they meet people they've known who've died, really died."

For something to do with my hands, I chop some onion. "May be," I say, "it's the light at the end of the tunnel."

"I think Hank's being serious," Joellen says.

"No, really, Beth," Hank says. "It's true. These people all say there's nothing to be afraid of-that it's beautiful, really beautiful."

"Everything is beau-ti-ful," I sing, "in its own waaay."

Joellen is still looking at me. "What's the matter, Beth?"

"Nothing. But I don't see it. If you're dead, you're dead, that's all.

I just can't believe people are really, honestly dying and then pop ping back to life. What are they, zombies? It doesn't make sense."

I kill some jalapenos with a butcher knife, throw them, seeds and all, into the pot.

"But that's what I'm saying." Hank spreads his arms. "It's a mys- tery, a matter of faith. That's why," he says, turning to Joellen, "I'm asking you. You're a very religious person. What's your perspec tive on this?"

Joellen sips her wine. Her hair gleams, backlit by the light over the stove. "I suppose it could be a state of grace. Or a chemically created illusion or blind of some sort-somebody said this. Like a substance released by the brain that kills the fear of death? But my personal feeling is that the light these people describe is the light of G.o.d's eye. That when we die we go back into G.o.d's eye, just as we once came out of it."

"Whoa, yeah," Hank says.

"Or it's a trick of the devil's," Joellen says.

Julian appears in the doorway. His grin is huge. "Speak of the devil!" he shouts.

Halfway through dinner the telephone rings and Joellen picks up the kitchen extension. She stands at the counter for a moment, not saying anything, then turns to me with round eyes. "I think this must be for you."

I know who it is before I take the phone. Lauren talks to me for a long time, making no sense: a blizzard of words comes down the line. "Tell me where you are," I insist. More babble, then a druggy blare of music and rattle of pool cues.

"Where are you? Laurie, honey? Where are you?"

She doesn't know where she is, or she's not telling. But she con-fides to me that she has always wanted to carve a poem on her face with a razor blade.

"Where the h.e.l.l are you?"

Lauren's voice chatters away from the receiver. A man's voice comes over the line roughly: "Yeah?"

"Yes," I say. "Where is she? What's happening?"

"h.e.l.l if I know. I was hoping you'd tell me, doll. She's out of it, is what's happening. You better come over."

He gives me the name of the place-a bar on Sixth-and I repeat it in the silent kitchen.

"I know that place," Hank says. He looks scared.

"So do I," Julian says softly.

The man on the telephone is still speaking. ". . . she have any mon-ey? 'Cause she's had two drinks already."

Lauren's voice rises in the background, keeping ragged time with the jukebox. Someone in the bar laughs. Some other son of a b.i.t.c.h claps.

I call the police, then my parents. My mother answers, breath-less. "Oh, Beth, I was just trying to call you. Is she with you? Your father's out looking for her."

I tell her about the call from Lauren. Julian is intent, standing now by the kitchen door with my jacket in his hands. His lips are moving. I check Joellen: she's praying, too, her eyes are closed and she's holding Hank's hand; the fingers of her other hand are run-ning blindly over his knuckles. And Hank-poor boy-looks at me helplessly.

"You should see this," my mother says. Her breathing is harsh, panicked. "She's poured water all over her room. I noticed a drip in the living room ceiling and when I came up she was pouring water into the window frames and along the baseboards. Into the frames!

Her bed, the carpet, everything's soaked. It's all ruined. Everything's ruined." She begins to cry. "She's been acting strange for days but what else is new? I heard the water running and running upstairs. I thought she was taking a shower. Everything's completely ruined."

"Mother, I have to go look for Laurie."

"I told your father to check her into Mercy, for good, this time. I can't take this anymore."

"Mother, don't-"

"Beth, the carpet squishes when you walk on it." *

Julian and I see the pulse of blue lights as we turn onto Sixth. "Lord G.o.d," he says quietly.

A few people have straggled out of the bar, drinks in hand, to watch as Lauren is escorted to the waiting car between two young policemen. When one of them puts his hand on her head, Lauren ducks as if burned, jackknifing into the back seat. Julian pays for her drinks while I give the policemen names, addresses, history.

I climb in beside Lauren, who rocks vigorously as the car pulls away, as if to urge it to greater speed, but by the time we roll through Mercy's gates her systems are shutting down; her hand, when I take it, is cool and limp. The hospital's bright, blank windows slide past.

Somewhere along the line Lauren's parted company with her shades and her eyes, no longer shielded by smoked gla.s.s, close. We lead her-me on one side, a policeman on the other-up the steps and through the electric doors. Lauren slumps into a wheelchair. She doesn't speak to me or to anyone, not even to the tired doctor who asks her to open her eyes and look at him. *

It's after midnight and raining when Julian lets me out in front of the house. Exhausted but hungry, we'd stopped for coffee and dough nuts after leaving my dad in the hospital parking lot, and now I'm clearheaded, light-footed, and stumbling all at the same time. I dash into the house by the kitchen door, take off my shoes, and negoti ate the stairs in the dark.

My heart sinks when I hear Joellen's voice: she's waited up and now she'll want to talk or, worse, pray. She's in a state now, by the sound of it: a murmur, a ragged catch of breath, then a long, shape-less moan.

She's in the Last Supper Club. I follow the sound of her ecstasy down the hallway, my skin coming out in gooseflesh. And while I'm disinclined to disturb her, I follow an irresistible impulse and gently push the unlatched door open.

Joellen is kneeling in the middle of the room, facing the win-dow. Her back is to me and her nakedness, in the dreamy, filtered moonlight, is a shock. She has her arms wrapped around herself and sways from side to side, moaning, a crazy woman embracing herself before G.o.d, and for a terrifying moment her head appears to double-to become two heads.

Then my eyes adjust to the dimness and I see that the arms wrapped around Joellen's back are not her own.

They're Hank's.

The other head belongs to Hank, too. His eyes are closed as he kisses her neck.

I back out of the room slick as a crayfish, and as I stand there listening to my heart pound, something Julian said earlier ticker-tapes across my mind. Paralyzed for the moment-literally unable to think or move-I fix all my attention on this.

We'd taken our coffee and doughnuts to the truck to avoid the shop's blaze of antiseptic light, and sat talking. Julian had a simple answer to the question of the back-from-death phenomenon.

"It's just a d.a.m.n lie," he said, his words skimming steam from his coffee. "Read your Bible: does it say anywhere in it that you can slip your soul on and off like a T-shirt? h.e.l.l, no."

I began to protest but he waved it away.

"Look, I don't care what anybody says, it's not my idea of death. When I go, I intend to shoot out of my body like a rocket, sugar, and never look back."

Now, standing in the darkness of the hallway, I consider what to do. Shoot out of the house like a rocket? I could confront them if I had the guts. But I turn away from that, as I try to turn away from my sister's illness, away from Hank, away from being forever and ever alone. Never look back, Julian had said. But as the sounds of Hank's and Joellen's lovemaking become more p.r.o.nounced, I real-ize that I have looked neither backward nor forward: rejecting the possibility of either heaven or h.e.l.l, I am left without even a devil to instill in me the fear of a G.o.d I cannot make visible.

But I shake free and stomp to my room, taking no care of the noise I make.

In bed, suddenly limp, I burrow under the blankets. I imagine springing Lauren from Mercy: We take off for the Coast, me driv-ing, Lauren talking. We slip into Mexico, find a village on the Baja where Lauren's held in awe by simple, adoring peasants. We live on beans and tortillas. The strange sisters slowly brown to the color of baked adobe, slip in and out of faulty Spanish over a deck of cards, pair of beers . . .

I wake up at first light, the lurid sunset of my expatriate dream fading, and hear footsteps in the hall. Joellen slips into the room, alights on the corner of my bed, tilting its geometry slightly-and for some reason this gesture of wobbling but unexpected intimacy slides a weight off my heart.

"You might knock first," I say.

"Sorry." Joellen droops, and her disheveled, golden hair folds like wings around her face. Her voice, when she speaks, is tiny. "How's Lauren?"

"I don't know. Crazy. Well-sedated, I'm sure. How's Hank?"

Little voice: "I sent him away."

"Ah."

Silence drains into the bedroom, filling it.

Joellen stirs. "I don't know how it happened," she murmurs. "We were going to pray for Lauren. He said he wanted to, so we went upstairs. And it occurred to me"-her voice rises and her eyes shine in the new light-"it came to me, as we were praying, that only love would save her. And I began to burn." Joellen looks into my eyes. "Do you know what I mean?" she says softly.

I try to remember a time when I have burned for love, but can't.

In my mind I see only the tip of a candle's flame, the bright upright finger that says no-not yet. *

I still have my key and enter my parents' house quietly enough, but when I reach the top of the stairs Dad's waiting for me.

"Christ, Beth, what time is it?" His voice is thickened with a heavy rheum of sleep, and when I hug him I seem to feel the years of acc.u.mulating fatigue in my arms. "Early," I say. "I'll make some coffee."

But before I do, I visit Lauren's room. Mother's right: The carpet squishes. The room's become a damp, cool cell. Water from Lau ren's spree, seeping into the plaster, has given rise to a dark wash of vaguely floral patterns that climb the ancient, lined wallpaper like a trellis. Lauren's garden appears to be growing before my eyes. *

I've decided to move-to go back home, at least for a while. Lau- ren's been home from the hospital for a month, everything's quiet.

Dad's putting her room back in shape; until then, we sisters will share a room.

When I went to see her in Mercy, she was hanging out in the day- room. She was calm and coherent but detached, accepting with out a word my gift of a new pair of shades. I asked her-for once, I seemed to be doing most of the talking-if she remembered what she'd done to her room. She didn't say anything for a moment, just stared at me, her shades the chilly dark of night windows.

"I don't know if I'd call it a memory. I was pretty high. My feet were wet." She shook her head, looking annoyed. "What do you remember?"

"About what?"

"Anything," Lauren said, lighting a cigarette. "Do you remember, for instance, being born?"

"Of course not."

"I do," Lauren said. She took off her shades and polished the lens es on the sleeve of her T-shirt. In the dayroom's uncompromising light, she looked middle-aged and ill. But she smiled slyly. "Talk about a memory," she said.

"f.u.c.k you," I said, and I smiled, too.

"Tell you what, Beth," she said. "I want to ask you something. Do you believe in G.o.d?"

"Yes." I imagined a distant, fabled relative I'd never met who loved me for no reason, whose love was not so much unrequited as un imaginable, almost comforting.

"Good. Pray for me," she said. Then shrugged, her smile strug gling back. "Or don't." *

I was brought up to believe that praying meant asking for some thing. When I was a child I prayed for a doll with shining hair and long, glossy limbs, for happiness, for what I thought of as "world peace," for the health of my family-and that they would not be taken from me. And when Lauren was taken away, I prayed on the way home from my first visit to the locked ward where Lauren sat laced and buckled into a straitjacket, spitting at our father as he approached her. By the time we arrived home, I had squeezed my heart so tightly that I imagined it had become a perfect stone, and I never prayed again. *

All my things are packed in boxes. Lauren and Joellen and I are sit ting in the kitchen having a last beer, waiting for Julian to come by with his truck. We're a somber trio. Joellen, although more quiet than usual, looks alternately pleased and distracted, and I wonder whether Hank is getting the guitar lessons he so deserves.

I need to get some things I'd stored in the bas.e.m.e.nt, but when I go down there I discover only one lightbulb works: most of the stairway, and all the far end of the bas.e.m.e.nt, is black. The watch ful darkness conjures a memory of childhood monsters; foolish as I feel, I can't bring myself to go in there alone, so I trudge back up to the apartment. We find a flashlight that turns out to be as dead as its downstairs relations.

"I'll go," Lauren says. "I'm not afraid of the dark." She drops her shades onto the table and stubs out her cigarette. We walk single file down the stairs beneath the one working lightbulb and enter the cold room. I intend to go first as long as Lauren's coming with me, but when we reach the edge of the yellow skirt of light, Lauren comes up beside me and our shadows merge. She takes my hand.

"This is nothing," she says.

I hear footsteps on the stairs, then see Joellen slipping through the gloom. I can't read her expression as she moves toward us, but when she takes my other hand I see all at once a vision of the fire-works of my own death-far off or near, but always present-and my soul lifting off splendidly, piercing the darkness, a brilliant, in-extinguishable rocket, a snap of sharp colors crinkled like tissue paper against the night sky.

"There isn't much to be afraid of," Joellen whispers.

We walk together into the chilly tank of darkness, the apostle, the lunatic, and the one whose fingers must see, whose eyes must touch, to believe. Over our heads, this house of prayer looms, vast and silent. I close my eyes and walk blind, letting them lead me. In a few moments Lauren flicks her lighter and I feel the feather of flame beating against my eyelids, but I don't open my eyes right away. Not just yet. I want to savor a long moment of darkness be-fore I see my way again.

Physical Wisdom.

In the spring of the year that we moved from Chicago to Loma Feliz, California, I began to be afraid to sleep indoors.

I was sixteen, living with my parents in the house my father had rented after walking away from a well-paying job with a Chicago psychiatric firm-his words-to take a civilian position at Camp Pendleton, counseling marines who'd had second thoughts about serving their country. I understood, as we packed the rental truck with the things we hadn't sold, that my father had taken a step down in the world. But this knowledge didn't jibe at all with his cheerful-ness as he stood high in the back of the opened-up truck, looking both clumsy and powerful stripped to a T-shirt and cutoffs, flexing his white, heavy arms and slapping his hands together impatiently as I struggled toward him with yet another load.

August was nearly done. A layered, warm-and-chilly wind blew in from Lake Michigan, flipping what was left of my father's hair across the smooth crescent of his bald spot. I was to start school, in California, in a week.

They're modern parents. Talk, talk, talk. They'd asked me what I felt about moving-and what could I say? Wasn't it already de-cided? My father laid a map out on the kitchen table and reached way across America to the dot that was Loma Feliz, a town so small its name had been edged offsh.o.r.e where it drifted, an orphan in the blue Pacific. I scanned the intervening s.p.a.ce-the vast, empty squares of the western states-while my father described our new home: a "vintage" ranch fifteen minutes' walk from the ocean. Av-ocado trees in the backyard. A large, bougainvillea-covered shed that my mother, at that time a painter of sensual reinterpretations of biblical themes-her Mary Magdalen was less than entirely pen itent-planned to set up as a studio. *

"Robert, are you awake?" My father nodded absently, straining his attention westward, intent on getting us to a motel before night fell. Anch.o.r.ed between us, my mother squeezed my hand to let me know she was happy. I looked out at the dimming, surreal desert landscape and felt sure I would never see a tree again-a real tree. I remembered avocados from the supermarket in Chicago: the size, heft, and weight (I guessed) of hand grenades. *

My father drove north to Camp Pendleton every weekday morn ing at seven. Mom needed more time to get started. She routinely dumped the breakfast dishes into the sink and made a second pot of coffee, poured a cup for me, then sat quietly at the kitchen table, wrapped in the camouflage of an exotic, flowered robe, smoking the cigarettes my father couldn't abide and gathering herself for her day's work.

I walked to school through the village in the cold morning sun light-not cold by Chicago standards, but damp. By afternoon, when I walked home, the sky would be bright, glaringly blue, and the day hot. On the hottest days, it was really only when you got close enough to the ocean to hear the breakers' echoing aftershocks that the air cooled.

Coming home one day I stumbled; I thought I'd caught my shoe in a crack in the sidewalk. But suddenly I seemed to be drunk, or what I thought drunk was: I lurched and nearly fell. Then I lost my balance and fell down. My books tumbled out of my arms, one of them opening neatly on the gra.s.s.