“They must have soaked it in one of those toxic shit things. That used to burn out so many people back then.”
“Yes, I’m lucky I ever got my head back. A freak thing– I had smoked pot a lot of times before and that never happened. That’s why I do tobacco, now, after that. Anyhow, it wasn’t like fainting; I didn’t feel I was going to fall, because I had nothing to fall with, no body. . . and there was no down to fall toward. Everything, including myself, just”– she gestured–“expired. Like the last drop out of a bottle. And then, presently, they rolled the film again. The feature we call reality.” She paused, puffing on her tobacco cigarette. “I never told anyone about it before.”
“Were you frightened about it?”
She nodded. “Consciousness of unconsciousness, if you dig what I mean. When we do die we won’t feel it because that’s what dying is, the loss of all that. So, for example, I’m not at all scared of dying anymore, not after that pot bad trip. But to grieve; it’s to die and be alive at the same time. The most absolute, overpowering experience you can feel, therefore. Sometimes I swear we weren’t constructed to go through such a thing; it’s too much–your body damn near self-destructs with all that heaving and surging. But I want to feel grief. To have tears.”
“Why?” He couldn’t grasp it; to him it was something to be avoided. When you felt that you got the hell out fast.
Ruth said, “Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. In some fashion you split with yourself and accompany it, go part of the way with it on its journey. You follow it as far as you can go. I remember one time when I had this dog I loved. I was roughly seventeen or eighteen–just around the age of consent, that’s how I remember. The dog got sick and we took him to the vet’s. They said he had eaten rat poison and was nothing more than a sack of blood inside and the next twenty-four hours would determine if he’d survive. I went home and waited and then around eleven P.M. I crashed. The vet was going to phone me in the morning when he got there to tell me if Hank had lived through the night. I got up at eight-thirty and tried to get it all together in my head, waiting for the call. I went into the bathroom–I wanted to brush my teeth–and I saw Hank, at the bottom left part of the room; he was slowly in a very measured dignified fashion climbing invisible stairs. I watched him go upward diagonally as he trudged and then at the top right margin of the bathroom he disappeared, still climbing. He didn’t look back once. I knew he had died. And then the phone rang and the vet told me that Hank was dead. But I saw him going upward. And of course I felt terrible overwhelming grief, and as I did so, I lost myself and followed along with him, up the fucking stairs.”
Both of them stayed silent for a time.
“But finally,” Ruth said, clearing her throat, “the grief goes away and you phase back into this world. Without him.”
“And you can accept that.”
“What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don’t ever completely come back from where you went with him–a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A nick out of it. A cut that never heals. And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can’t feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You’ll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.”
“There are no cuts in my heart,” Jason said.
“If you split now,” Ruth said huskily, but with composure unusual for her, “that’s the way it’ll be for me right then and there.”
“I’ll stay until tomorrow,” he said. It would take at least until then for the pol lab to discern the spuriousness of his ID cards.
Did Kathy save me? he wondered. Or destroy me? He really did not know. Kathy, he thought, who used me, who at nineteen knows more than you and I put together. More than we will find out in the totality of our lives, all the way to the graveyard.
Like a good encounter-group leader she had torn him down–for what? To rebuild him again, stronger than before? He doubted it. But it remained a possibility. It should not be forgotten. He felt toward Kathy a certain strange cynical trust, both absolute and unconvincing; one half of his brain saw her as reliable beyond the power of the telling of it, and the other half saw her as debased, for sale, and fucking up right and left. He could not put it together into one view. The two images of Kathy remained superimposed in his head.
Maybe I can resolve my parallel conceptions of Kathy before I leave here, he thought. Before morning. But maybe he could stay even one day after that . . . it would be stretching it, however. How good really are the police? he asked himself. They managed to get my name wrong; they pulled the wrong file on me. Isn’t it possible they’ll fuck up all down the line? Maybe. But maybe not.
He had mutually opposing conceptions of the police, too. And could not resolve those either. And so, like a rabbit, like Emily Fusselman’s rabbit, froze where he was. Hoping as he did so that everyone understood the rules: you do not destroy a creature that does not know what to do.
12
The four gray-wrapped pols clustered in the light of the candlelike outdoor fixture made of black iron and cone of perpetual fake flame flickering in the night dark.
“Just two left,” the corporal said almost soundlessly; he let his fingers speak for him as he drew them across the rental lists. “A Mrs. Ruth Gomen in two eleven and an Allen Mufi in two twelve. Which’ll we hit first?”
“The Mufi man’s,” one of the uniformed officers said; he smacked his plastic and shot nightstick against his fingers, eager in the dim light to finish it up, now that the end had at last come into sight.
“Two twelve it is,” the corporal said, and reached to stroke the door chimes. But then it occurred to him to try the doorknob.
Good. One chance out of several, a minor possibility but suddenly, usefully true. The door was unlocked. He signaled silence, grinned briefly, then pushed the door open.
They saw into a dark living room with empty and nearly empty drink glasses placed here and there, some on the floor. And a great variety of ashtrays overfilled with crushed cigarette packages and ground-out butts.
A cigarette party, the corporal decided. Broken up, now. Everyone went home. With the exception perhaps of Mr. Mufi.
He entered, shone his light here and there, shone it at last toward the far door leading deeper into the over-priced apartment. No sound. No motion. Except the dim, distant, muted chatter of a radio talk show at minimal volume.
He trod across the wall-to-wall carpet, which depicted in gold Richard M. Nixon’s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above and wails of misery below. At the far door he trod on God, who was smiling a lot as He received his Second Only Begotten Son back into His bosom, and pushed open the bedroom door.
In the big double bed, pulpy-soft, a man asleep, shoulders and arms bare. His clothes heaped on a handy chair. Mr. Allen Mufi, of course. Safe and home in his own private double bed. But–Mr. Mufi was not alone in his very own private bed. Involved with the pastel sheets and blankets a second indistinct shape lay curled up, asleep. Mrs. Mufi, the corporal thought, and shone his light toward her, with mannish curiosity.
All at once Allen Mufi–assuming it was he–stirred. He opened his eyes. And instantly sat bolt upright, staring fixedly at the pols. At the light of the flashlight.
“What?” he said, and he rasped with fear, a deep, convulsive release of shaking breath. “No,” Mufi said, and then snatched for some object on the table beside his bed; he dove into the darkness, white and hairy and naked, for something invisible but precious to him. Desperately. He sat back up then, panting, clutching it. A pair of scissors.
“What’s that for?” the corporal asked, shining the light into the metal of the scissors.
“I’ll kill myself,” Mufi said. “If you don’t go away and– leave us alone.” He stuck the closed blades of the scissors against his hair-darkened chest, near his heart.