We Are Here (35 page)

I turned to go, feeling bad for intruding on his sickness and while he was asleep, but realized there was someone else in the room. There was a chair in the corner, pointed toward the bed. Another man, younger than the other or in better health and shape, was sitting there. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped tightly together, intently watching the man in the bed. He was rocking back and forth.

“Oh, Billy,” Lizzie said.

He didn’t answer. Lizzie put her hand on his shoulder. “How long have you been here?”

He licked his lips. “Two days.”

“What happened?”

“Heart attack.”

“But he’s only …”

“I know. I
know
. But it’s been coming. I realize that now. I hadn’t seen him in years. I didn’t understand how he’d become. I thought it was me losing faith, slowly going hollow. But it was him all along.”

The figure in the bed pulled in a rasping breath. “No,” Billy said, leaning forward. “No …”

After a few seconds the man in the bed breathed out again, and the rhythm of his chest’s rise and fall seemed to settle. Lizzie stood by the bed, looking down. “Why isn’t anybody here with him?”

“They were. I’ve been standing at the end of the bed all day, out of their way. The doctors say he’s stable, so they’ve gone home to get some rest and change their clothes and, I don’t know, that kind of thing.”

“Well, if the doctor says that then … it could all be okay.”

The man shook his head. In the weak light his face looked pinched, almost translucent. I don’t think he had any idea that Kristina and I were even in the room.

“I felt it. I didn’t realize it, but I
felt
it. That’s why … that’s why. It
wasn’t
my fault.”

Lizzie looked at us. “Go,” she said. She no longer looked elfin, or distant. She looked like if we didn’t go then bad things would happen to us.

“Kris,” I said … but then the man on the bed made a quiet, terrible sound, as if he’d tried to pull in another breath and found the world withholding it.

He tried again, and this time it sounded like he’d succeeded but the air had gone the wrong way inside his body, as if there was no longer any proper place in there for it. His eyes opened, staring up at the ceiling, and in them was all possible knowledge of what was happening to him. He knew, and because he knew it was impossible for the rest of us not to know too.

“Get a nurse,” Kristina said. “John, get a—”

A final exhale, an out breath that seemed to last far longer than it should for a pair of lungs to void themselves of air—as if instead it was clearing out the stale remains of every single inhale, back through thirty years of in-and-outs and sneezes, to childhood breaths in fields and classrooms, breaths sucked in to blow out birthday candles, back even to the first breath scrabbled out of a cold new world, to give the power to wail.

The man on the chair—Billy—was standing now, coming closer to the bed, arms held down and rigid by his sides. He closed his eyes.

“Goodbye, my friend.”

The breath finished, or came to a point where it was no longer going on. In the life of the person in the bed, nothing ever happened again.

The man standing next to him seemed to condense. It was as if something had shifted in the lighting, making a shape that had been so inconsequential when we entered that I hadn’t even noticed him, into something more substantial. Not bigger, exactly, but much more
there
.

He was motionless for a moment, then took in a
huge
jagged breath, his eyes flying open. “Ha,” he said.

He breathed out massively, then back in again. “Ha!” He started walking around the room, faster and faster, arms and legs jerking robotically. “Oh, yes,” he said, starting to laugh. “
That’s
what I’m talking about.”

He pulled another monstrous breath in through mouth and nose, and held it down, as if savoring it.

“Billy,” Lizzie said. “Billy, slow down.”

He paid no attention to her. He completed one more chaotic circuit of the room and nearly knocked me down as he went striding out the door, arms thrashing.

Lizzie ran after him, leaving us in a hospital room with a cooling body and no clue what was going on.

“What the hell just happened?”

“Let’s get you home,” Kristina said, with a final glance at the dead man in the bed. “There’s … stuff we need to talk about.”

We didn’t go home, however. In the cab we realized that if Reinhart did decide to come back and finish the discussion tonight, then directly after the hospital he’d come hunting where we lived. Both of us believed he’d already have that information or be able to obtain it, and that being trapped up at the top of a five-story building was a bad defensive position.

I hated the feeling of hiding from him, but on the other hand—and perhaps contrary to appearances—I’m not a total fool. If we were going to meet again, it needed to be in circumstances of my choosing, or at least at a time when I could straighten my back and move my limbs without feeling like I was going to pass out. Merely lolling in the back of a yellow cab felt like someone was still hitting me, and my brain was so washy and vague that I wasn’t completely convinced of what I thought I’d seen in the private room in the hospital.

Trying to work out where to hide in the middle of the night is a good way to focus the mind on the relationships in your life. The news that came back was not good. The restaurant made no sense and neither did the apartments of any staff members. Even if we’d been close enough to impose upon them, their connection to the Adriatico would rule them out. I’d traced Reinhart to his lunch via this kind of link and I had no doubt he’d be able to do the same in reverse. The only other person we could think of was Catherine, which clearly wasn’t an option either. Once we’d run out of ideas and sat in silence for a few minutes, Kristina took my hand.

“We don’t really live here, do we?”

“No,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should move. Live in a neighborhood. Try to hang with some real people for a change.”

She shook her head.

“Why? I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“Throwing money at a more expensive apartment isn’t going to solve anything.”

“It might help.” She shook her head again, with a finality I found unnerving. “Kris, what?”

“How much cash do you have on you now?”

“Not enough for a hotel room, if that’s what you’re thinking. And I didn’t bring any cards out with me.”

“How much?”

Wincing, I managed to lever my wallet out of my pocket and check the contents. “About eighty bucks.”

She took the bills and shoved them through the slot in the glass toward the driver.

“That’s what we have,” she said to him.

The driver, an elderly man in a turban, looked surprised—but didn’t give the money back. “Where to?”

“Just drive.”

“I need a destination.”

“Take us to wherever forty bucks gets us, and then come back. In the meantime, shut this slot thing, please, and then turn your radio up.”

The guy decided the money was worth the attitude, and did what he’d been asked. Kristina sat back in the seat, and—after a couple of false starts—told me what had happened to her before she turned up at the hospital.

I listened, and tried not to interrupt.

The money bought us half an hour, enough for me to get Kristina to repeat the sections of her story that I found hardest to believe and also to establish that she at least half believed what Lizzie had told her as they sat together in the park. I spent the last five minutes in silence, watching out the window as smeared neon and streetlights flowed across the pane like bright horizontal raindrops. It was hard to push focus past these and other reflections in the glass and out onto the people on the sidewalks, leaning in doorways, sitting on benches, the people who are always out there, on their way somewhere or back, glimpsed from the side or behind, people whose identity and business you’ll never know and who really, in your heart of hearts, you afford no more reality than the shadows of birds flying overhead.

Yes, clearly they represent something. But something real? Something as substantial as you and me? I didn’t understand how what Kristina had told me could possibly work, but that did not mean it could not be so. There had been a time when I didn’t understand how I could live in a world where my eldest son was dead, in which I could look at the woman I married and see someone I didn’t recognize, or how I could now be living three thousand miles from Tyler, my remaining boy, and not have seen him in a year or have the faintest idea of what he was like now that he was six years old and older than Scott ever got to be. It had seemed impossible that I could find or take the steps that would lead me from a previous reality to these new ones without breaking apart on the journey. I did not, in fact, handle the events well—except perhaps in that I did ultimately survive, and woke up one morning and understood that this new world I lived in was real, and that therefore I must be real too.

Did that mean that the previous one had been
un
real? That reality in which Scott walked the earth, or my mother, come to that—where did it stand now? It did not feel as if it lay back in time, that a mere sequence of events was what had moved it away from me. It felt like it still existed to one side, through a glass wall a hundred feet thick. I could see the land on the other side in my mind’s eye, and sometimes in melancholy fantasy or sleeping dream it came closer than that, as if when I poured my soul and all the emotional energy I had into it these shades on the other side of alive/not alive and true/not true remained far more proximal than I’d thought. Close, in fact, to still being real.

If you believe life is worth living, it is. If you believe you are fat, you are. And if you believe for long enough, and strongly enough, that someone imaginary is real, and they were to come to believe it too …

Kris waited as patiently as she could, but in the end dug me in the ribs. “Well?”

“
Ow
.”

“Sorry. But …
well
? Talk to me. Say something.”

I leaned forward and opened the slot to the driver’s compartment. “How much we got left?”

He glanced at the meter. “About five bucks.”

“Take us to Chelsea,” I said.

I leaned against the railing at the bottom of the steps as Kristina hesitated at the door.

“John, it’s two o’clock in the morning.”

“Push the thing.”

She pressed quickly on the door buzzer, trying to make a noise that should be audible to someone already awake, but hopefully not enough to raise the sleeping.

At first nothing seemed to happen, but then we heard the slow tramp of footsteps coming down the staircase inside. There was a pause, then the sound of a bolt and a chain being slid across. The door opened.

Father Jeffers stood in yellow glow inside. He looked me up and down. “What on earth happened to you?”

“Not what,” I said. “Who.”

An hour later, three things had happened. I’d been given several cups of strong coffee, which had helped. I’d seen myself in a mirror, which had not. Though I felt Kristina’s and Jeffers’s reactions had been extreme, a look at my face would leave you in no doubt that I’d been in a fight and lost. Apart from a few stitches in a cut under my left cheekbone, it was mainly bruising and scrapes, however. I wouldn’t want to have to apply for a job in childcare or public relations, but I’ve seen worse, and the coffee and a fistful of painkillers from the priest’s bathroom cabinet had made me feel better.

The third thing was that Kristina had told the priest what she’d told me, and I’d sketched out other events of the last week. Jeffers had listened impassively, as though withstanding a parishioner’s doleful recitation of excessive drinking or unwholesome thoughts toward his neighbor’s ass, in preparation for trotting out the prescribed means of atoning for such deviations from accepted moral practice. Only at one point did he seem more affected, when Kristina confirmed that Lizzie had been our first point of contact.

“You’re absolutely sure she was taking an interest in this friend of yours?”

“Yes,” I said. “I told you the time I disturbed your piano practice. It’s been going on for some time.”

“What do you mean by ‘some time’?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Certainly a few weeks, and that’s what had been freaking Catherine out. But she also seems to think it happened a long time ago too.”

Jeffers didn’t appear surprised. We were in his study, dimly lit by a couple of yellow lamps. He and Kristina had insisted that I take the comfortable chair, and were perched on wooden ones.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said eventually. “Lizzie starting to follow again is a backward step. I shall need to discuss it with her.”

Kris was watching him, as if beginning to get an idea about something. “Fine,” she said. “But it’s not just about Lizzie. There are others, too. Flaxon, the other ones that call themselves Angels. Lizzie’s friend Maj, too. And she mentioned another … Golzen?”

Jeffers smiled stiffly. “I’m aware of him, yes.”

“How many of these people
are
there?”

“I must have met fifty over the last three years, perhaps closer to a hundred. I suspect there are many, many more. I have been trying to work with some of them.”

“Work how?”

“Develop a program of recovery. Help them to move from their current state to a more positive one.”

“But who
are
they?” I asked. “They’re basically people who’ve fallen between the cracks, right?”

“No,” he said. “It’s … more complicated than that, and you’re not going to believe it.”

“Try us,” Kris said.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“They’re dead.”

Kristina and I stared at him.

“I told you.” He sighed. “One of the biggest problems with my job is that ‘dead’ is a word that startles people.”

“It’s a big word,” I said.

“Of course. Because these days it says a world-changing event has happened. It didn’t use to. People had a relationship with those who had gone before. Some believe one of the reasons our species turned from a nomadic lifestyle was we started to bury the departed, housing them before we even housed ourselves. If you have an ongoing dialogue with the dead then you don’t want to leave them behind. Heaven was a way of getting around this—a realm that is always ‘above,’ wherever you are and from which the deceased can be benignly looking down even if you keep moving. For thousands of years religion supported people’s grief by telling them the dead remained in reach, but now science says that when someone dies they’re gone forever except in memory, and that those memories are merely electrical impulses in a bundle of fragile flesh, and so death has become the big divide. The bigger the chasm, the more terrifying it becomes.”