The Man in the Window (17 page)

Iris kicked into her neutral professional gear. It didn’t pay to be genial; that just made the lungers crankier. Iris understood, and didn’t take their moods personally, or at least tried not to. She imagined that to be chronically short of breath was akin to spending twenty or thirty years half-drowning in high waves while the rest of the beachgoers frolicked blithely on shore.

“Hello, Mrs. Horner,” Iris said. “I’m Iris, I’m your nurse, and I’ll—”

Mrs. Horner whipped off her mask. “Hold it. Hold it right there,” she gasped. “You’re not my nurse. There was someone in here, Candy, Mandy…”

“Sandy,” said Iris. “Her shift ended. Now I’m assigned—”

“Oh, you are? Assigned? Is that it? I have no choice, of course. They just assign you somebody, whether you like it or not.”

Iris could hear Winnie and Inez cheerfully chattering out at the nurse’s desk. She said, “Mrs. Horner, you’re making yourself
more short of breath. Why don’t you lie back on the stretcher, and let me—”

Mrs. Horner suddenly pushed Iris’s hand away. Iris had been about to take Mrs. Horner’s blood pressure.

“Get that thing away from me. You’re not doing that.”

Iris heard something snap. Her own mood, perhaps? No. Just Inez’s bubble gum out in the hallway. “Mrs. Horner, this is only a blood-pressure cuff. It’s not going to hurt you.”

Mrs. Horner’s bulging Pekingese eyes glared at her. “You’re right. Because it’s not going on me.” She took some breaths. “That thing cuts off my circulation. Cuts off my oxygen.”

“It goes on your arm, not around your throat.” Although in your case, thought Iris, I might make an exception.

“I don’t care. Leave me alone.”

“Okay, Mrs. Horner. I’ll start your IV then. Get some medication in you.” Iris began to assemble things from the IV tray.

“Oh no you don’t. I get my medication by mouth.”

“You’re too sick for that now.”

“I got my rights, Shorty. You’re not—”

With that, Iris marched over to the door, closed it, then turned around to face Mrs. Horner. She raised a finger and pointed it like a loaded gun, directly at Mrs. Horner’s nose. “Mrs. Horner, I’m sorry. But you caught me at the wrong hour of the wrong day of the wrong fucking year.” Mrs. Horner held her breath, not an easy thing for a chronic lunger. Iris continued. “Now, in my opinion, you’re a sick lady. But if you don’t want us to treat you, that’s your choice. Like you said, you got rights. But it’s pretty warm out there for May, Mrs. Horner, and in that heat, and breathing the way you are, I bet you last under an hour. Then we get you back, by ambulance this time, and we might even be able to save you. I doubt it, though, from looking at you. Now, if you don’t want me to help you, then there’s the door. There are plenty of sick people out there who do need my help. And one more thing. My name’s not Shorty. It’s Iris. It’s not a great name, but it’s the one I got, and you sure as hell better use it.”

Mrs. Horner looked at Iris, remembered to breathe again, then fell back against the elevated head of the stretcher with her arm straight out. “Here,” she whispered. “For my blood pressure. Not too tight though, okay… Iris?”

“No sweat, Mrs. Horner,” Iris said, wrapping the cuff. “You won’t even feel me pump it up.”

CHAPTER THREE

W
AS IT
like being born, looking up from your bassinet and seeing those curious and strangely disconcerted faces, or was it more like dying, lying in your open coffin, eyes wide, gazing upon those same disconcerted faces, disconcerted by the newness of you and the unexpectedness of your act, by the sudden alteration in the norm of the neighborhood, and in the rules that placed you, Louis, in your house, hidden, and your hiddenness contemplated from a known distance, an inviolable distance, you in there, us out here, so what in God’s name—Louis saw in every pair of eyes that now blinked from the middle of every pale face that stared down at him—do you think you’re doing sprawled here in this tulip bed out in the world of blue May skies and a beaming sun that’s shining on every good citizen of Waverly, a term that has not, for sixteen years and up to this precise moment, included you?

Louis couldn’t decide, being born or dying, but it was something like that. His eyes moved from Kitty to Francine to Bev and Bert, and then to Carl. Then he did something the newborn and the dead never do: He spoke. If a dead man were to speak, he might just say the word that passed in a whisper from behind Louis’s scarf.

“Boo,” Louis said.

Wasn’t that what they expected from the monster of Waverly? Certainly Francine Koessler expected it. No one else could understand him, but she’d been listening so hard her ears about popped off, so when Louis went “Boo,” she jumped back behind the others with a little scream. “Get back, everybody. He’s crazy dangerous!”

They’d been standing in a circle around Louis, but they drew back, because this was not a normal man in a normal kind
of accident. But Louis didn’t do anything except lie there, so they looked at each other, and positioned themselves around him again.

“He’ll attack. I seen him do it,” said Francine behind them, clutching her Minky.

Carl Lerner went down on his knees beside Louis. Kitty hunkered above Carl, because if Carl was going to do anything with Louis’s hat or scarf, Kitty wanted to be the first to see.

“Hey buddy. Can you speak? Where you hurt?” asked Carl.

And then, in a simple, ordinary gesture of human concern, Carl did something that no one, beyond Atlas and Gracie, had done for sixteen years. Carl, who had no memories or imaginings. Carl, who saw him as the recluse, but not the monster, because who has it in him, thought Louis watching in wonder, to do to a monster the thing that Carl now did. Which was to reach out across sixteen years and touch him with a hand that was lighter and more lovely than the teenage kiss of Ariel Nesmith.

“Hey buddy. Where you hurt?” said Carl, touching Louis lightly on the shoulder.

Louis stared at Carl’s hand. For a moment, under Carl’s touch, Louis wasn’t sure that he was hurt, that his broken arm hadn’t suddenly healed. And if his arm had healed, if a painless knitting of bones had taken place, what then had occurred under his scarf and beneath the lowered rim of his baseball hat? Had he grown a nose, did he have his eyebrows back, if he licked his lips would they be smooth and full again, had Carl’s touch regenerated to pinkness and health the skin on his forehead and cheeks? But when Louis shifted the arm that lay twisted beneath his body, the pain was instantly there, sharp and terrible, and it caused him to involuntarily speak out the answer to Carl’s question.

“My arm.”

“It’s a trick,” Francine called out from beyond the perimeter of neighbors who surrounded Louis. “He’ll get you close, then strangle you with his scarf.”

The entire group, including Louis, turned their eyes to Francine. She hugged Minky to her. “Well,” she said, “I mean, he might.”

Kitty looked again at Louis. The moment was escaping her, she knew. Her chance, the years she’d spent waiting for him to reveal himself. She began to reach for his scarf, slowly, to inch herself toward the complete knowledge of his wounds, to unwrap his mystery.

Louis smelled her oversweet wine breath, then saw the hand coming. He felt no comfort in its approach, nothing of what Carl in his innocence had given to him.

Kitty said hoarsely, “We better… we better get the scarf off… loosen his collar. He needs air. I think he needs…”

Louis said, “No,” and at the same moment, another hand stopped Kitty. Not Carl, but Bert, reached down and plucked Kitty’s hand from Louis’s scarf, plucked it as he might pluck a weed from amongst his winning roses. At first Louis couldn’t decide whether it was the compelling force of decency which induced Bert to intervene or simply his fussy ways. Yes, most likely Bert couldn’t tolerate the incongruous sight of Kitty’s hand on Louis’s scarf, because nothing was so out of order as that, no two things belonged less in conjunction, like the weed and the flower. For an odd moment, Louis wondered which was which; in Bert’s mind, was Louis and his scarf the flower, and Kitty’s hand the weed, or was it the other way around?

Kitty turned red with anger and disappointment, and just as quickly, Louis saw relief on her face, on all their faces, because really, wasn’t it enough just to have him out here among us, let’s get used to the miraculous idea of that first, one thing at a time, whoa Nelly. In the interest of self-preservation, because that’s what it really was, let’s do this thing in degrees, who knows what will be unleashed upon us, and all of Waverly, if we get to tinkering with that hat and scarf?

That settled, Louis could concentrate on the mounting pain in his arm. Was it really pain? The flames had given him
his definition of pain, and what could compare to the agony of flame, the fundamental force of energy, heat and light, reshaping the soft flesh of his sixteen-year-old face? He tried to move, but the arm stopped him, providing him with another definition of pain.

Carl said, “Hold on, buddy, let me help you up.” Carl caught Louis under his good arm, his left one, and Bert provided support from behind. “Easy now. That’s it, you’re almost there. Okay, that’s it.”

He sat up in the bed of battered tulips. He supported his arm, and looked up at his window, the window from which he had descended. There was no getting back to it, no rolling the film backwards—neighbors running in reverse, broken tulips snapping themselves upright, and he himself flying upward toward the window, ass first, and then a hesitation at the windowsill before he was suddenly gone from view. He turned and looked at his neighbors, one by one. So this is my welcoming committee, as ordinary a group of Earthlings as a monster from outer space could want. Of course, he hadn’t imagined it would go this way, when after Atlas’s death, he began to have thoughts about how he might join the world again. Or if not actually join, at least get out the front door and sniff around a little. If he did do it, and he never really thought he would, he had imagined it would be a matter of increments, step by microscopic step. He might actually get outside, in the full daylight, in a matter of a few short years. And now, here he’d gone and thrown open his window and just hurled himself, because whether he jumped or fell, it was still an act of force. The bonds were broken and he was going down, there could be no further debate, except for a brief second when he was uncertain whether he was plummeting toward the tulips or the tulips were plummeting up toward him. Maybe, he thought in that one second before he hit, maybe the world, the actual solid daylight earth, is tired of waiting, and it’s coming up to the window to meet me, since I haven’t in sixteen years exhibited any inclination to jump down and meet it. But
when he hit, he got his sense back, and he understood that at long last he had made his move. Who would have ever thought it possible?

Bev filed away her condolence recipes and spoke softly to Louis. Louis appreciated her consideration, and Carl’s, even if they didn’t know they were being considerate. He needed lowered decibels, muted voices.

She said, “Gracie’s not home, is she, Louis?” That was obvious to them all now. Gracie wasn’t home, or she’d have appeared. One or two of them wondered if having his momma gone might have caused Louis to panic, for who knew the delicate condition of a mind like his, what minor alteration in the regularity of his day might cause him to fling himself from a window? With Gracie gone, their commitment to Louis, whose very existence had been something of a question five minutes earlier, continued to grow.

“She’s out with a friend,” he said. “Gracie’s with Donna Hodges.” He attempted to stand. “If you could just, kind of, help me back inside.”

Carl wouldn’t let Louis get up. “You got to go to the hospital. I can see the break in that arm.”

Hospital. That’s how it would go, that’s how it would go. Louis let out a little moan and closed his eyes. He sank to his knees, still clutching his injured arm, and began to moan louder and sway from side to side. Hospital. He should have known. The weeks in the hospital as they worked on his face, as they struggled with the fire on his skin, igniting it and extinguishing it, hour after hour, as they dressed his skin, and applied ointments, and scraped at his wounds, igniting and extinguishing. And now I go back. I have waited sixteen years, and they have waited too, at the hospital. They knew I would be back, that sooner or later I’d jump, as if the house where I imagined I was safe had actually been smoldering, sixteen years smoldering, and then it burst into flame. Trapped, I ran to the window and jumped, only it’s no good. Louis swayed and moaned, and though they didn’t
realize it, all the neighbors began to sway with him, to pick up his rhythms. I jumped but it’s no good, and now Louis opened his eyes wide and saw that the flames had come with him, that he was surrounded by the heat, and the burning orange light.

“Flames!” he shouted.

All the neighbors looked where he looked, and in the mounting madness of Louis falling from the window, Louis in the tulips, Louis speaking to them, in the accumulation of so much Louis where for all that hidden time there had been no Louis, in the agitation of the moment, they gave themselves over to him. Not even Carl was immune. Louis swept over them, his vision became their vision, his flames became their flames.

“Flames,” shouted Louis, pointing to the pavement where Bev and Kitty were standing. Instantly their feet went down, then again and again, stamping at the flames that sprang up from cracks in the sidewalk.

“Flames.” And Louis pointed to the grass, and Bert ran over, and his foot went down, as he tried to smother the orange licks of fire that spread along the green of the front lawn.

“Flames!” Only this time it wasn’t Louis but Francine who shouted, because if there ever was someone waiting to leap into a hysterical episode, it was Francine. She dropped Minky and ran over to Bev and Kitty on the sidewalk, hopping up and down on the little bursts of fire, her eyes ablaze and happy, her open mouth emitting grunts of effort.

Carl leaned over Louis, to shield him, his hand out, fluttering in the air like a butterfly to keep the sparks and embers from landing on Louis. The firefighters whirled and jumped and stamped their feet. Their faces flowed red with sweat and exertion, and they made excited noises because at last they could see that they were winning, not one lick of flame had reached Louis or would now. Louis saw that from beneath Carl where he had cowered, watching in amazement as his neighbors beat back the fire. How was such a thing possible? Fire could be beaten. It had never occurred to him. Why should it have, when the evidence of
its casual malevolence was there before him in his dresser mirror every night as he unwrapped himself before bed? And yet, each time his neighbors brought down their feet, the fire withdrew, lacking the energy even to blacken the soles of their shoes. At last their movements slowed to a kind of dance of victory, as they snuffed out the scattered flarings on the lawn.