Last Days (15 page)

"Which do you prefer?" the man asked with a slight smile, gesturing at the paintings behind him.

"Does it matter?" asked Kline.

The man's face fell. "Of course it matters," he said.

"Is this a test?"

"Why would it be a test? It's just a simple question of taste."

"What if I say I like them both?"

"Do you like them both? Exactly the same?"

"What am I doing here exactly?" asked Kline. "What's all this about?"

"Where are my manners?" said the man. He reached out as if to lay his hand on Kline's remaining arm, instead touched Kline lightly with his stump. "You're with us," he said confidentially. "Trust me, you're safe here," he said.

"Who are you?"

"Call me Paul," said the man.

"Are you planning to kill me, Paul?"

"What a strange idea," said Paul.

"How long have I been here?"

Paul shrugged. "A few days," he said.

"Where's here?" asked Kline.

Paul smiled. "No need to worry about that now," he said.

"But," said Kline.

"No buts," said Paul, standing up now and moving toward the door. "You're still far from well. Lie back now. Try to sleep."

But he couldn't sleep. He lay in the bed, staring at the two paintings, the one on the left precise and clinical, the one on the right chiaroscuro and looking as though it had been done while the artist was channeling an insane Dutch master. The light coming through the window's panes slowly shifted, shuffling about the walls and then disappearing. The windows went slowly dark and opaque, the room lit by a single lamp to one side of him, near the wingchair in which Paul had been sitting. It was harder now to make the paintings out, the light from the lamp catching in the paint and beryling there, hiding the image behind.

In the half-light he began to grow anxious. He sat up slowly. His head ached but not as much as it had in the hospital. When he moved his shoulder, he still felt pressure in his eye, but nothing more. His legs were sore and worked only reluctantly, but after a moment he had edged his legs out of the bed and was standing.

Almost immediately, a blond man was beside him, touching his elbow lightly. He was not sure where the man had come from, certainly not through the door. From behind one of the curtains perhaps?

"You should rest," the blond man was saying in a soothing voice. "There's no need to get up." It was not the same man he had seen before, he realized, not Paul, although they looked similar. This man had a thicker face, was shorter.

"What do you want?" asked Kline.

"Is there something you need?" asked the man. "If you tell me what you need, I'll do my best to retrieve it for you."

"Where's Paul?" he asked.

"I'm Paul," the man said.

"Paul was the other one," said Kline. "You're not Paul."

"We're all Paul," the man said. He touched Kline lightly on the chest, nudged him until he sat on the bed. "Please," he said. "Please rest."

He let the second Paul coax him fully back into the bed, lifting up one of his legs and then the other, then dragging them over until he was lying again where he had been, in the half-light, staring at the vague shapes of the paintings. The Paul circled around behind his head and disappeared.

Getting out of the bed, even briefly, seemed to have exhausted him. Perhaps Paul, the second Paul, had been right.

In the morning he was awoken by a third blond man also missing his right hand. He came in through the door, a tray balanced precariously on his stump. He settled the tray on the bedside table, helped Kline to sit up, then moved the tray onto Kline's lap. Little silver vessels nestled fruits and a hardboiled egg and thick slices of bacon. There were toast points in each corner of the tray like a garnish and a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice.

Kline reached out and took the egg. He took a bite out of it, then looked into the chalky, cooked yolk. The blond man murmured approval.

"What is it?" asked Kline. Looking at him more closely, he could see that his hair wasn't naturally blond. It had been dyed.

"I was certain you'd take the egg first," said the man.

"You were?"

The man nodded, smiled.

"Is everything a test here?"

The man's smile fell. "I didn't mean to offend you," he said. "I would never presume to test you, friend Kline."

Kline grunted, put the rest of the egg in his mouth and chewed.

"What's your name?" Kline asked.

"I'm Paul," said the man.

"You're not," said Kline.

"We all are," he said.

Kline shook his head. "You can't all be Paul," he said.

"Why not?" said the man. "Is this a teaching?"

"A teaching?" said Kline. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Should I write it down?"

"Write what down?"

"'You can't all be Paul.' And whatever else comes thereafter from your lips."

"No," said Kline, a strange dread starting to grow within him. "I don't want you to write anything down."

"Is that too a teaching?" said Paul. "'Write nothing down'?"

"Nothing's a teaching," said Kline. "Stop saying that."

Kline started into the bacon. As he ate, Paul stared at him, his brow creased in concentration, as if afraid to miss something.

"Am I a prisoner here?" Kline asked.

"A prisoner?" said Paul. "But we're helping you."

"I want to leave," said Kline.

"Why?" asked Paul. "We believe in you, friend Kline," he said. "Why would you want to leave? You're not healed yet."

"You haven't always been called Paul, have you?" Kline said.

Paul looked surprised. "No," he admitted reluctantly.

"What did you used to be called?"

"I'm not allowed to say," said Paul. "It's a dead name. 'You must lose yourself to find yourself.' That's a teaching."

"It's all right to say," said Kline. "You can tell me." Paul looked to either side of him and then leaned forward, whispering into Kline's ear: "Brian."

"Brian?" said Kline.

Paul winced.

"Why Paul?" asked Kline. "Why are you all Paul?"

"Because of the Apostle," said Paul. "And the other one, the philosopher's brother."

"What's this all about?"

"A work," said Paul, his cadence slightly odd as if he were a child reciting something memorized. "A marvelous work and a wonder, such as has never come to pass before in the world of men." He leaned in closer. "We have a relic for you," he whispered.

"A relic?"

"Sshh," said Paul. "They didn't know its value," he said. "But our agent did."

Kline caught a brief movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to the doorway to see another man standing there, one hand missing, hair blond. He was frowning.

"Ah," said Kline. "You must be Paul."

The Paul beside him stiffened. He lifted the breakfast tray and hurried out. The Paul in the doorway moved to let him past, then followed him out, pushing the door shut behind him.

Another Paul came in a few hours later to bring him lunch, then another Paul not long afterward who changed his dressings and massaged his legs and helped him up to the bathroom. Neither were talkative, both answering his questions simply and noncommittally. Yes, they were each called Paul. Yes, they both had had other names, dead names, but both were firm in their refusal to divulge them. No, he was not a prisoner, they claimed, but they both encouraged him so strongly to remain in bed that he felt as if he were a prisoner. To the question "What am I doing here?" and the question "What do you want from me?"--each posed to a different Paul--they just smiled. All, they assured him, would be explained in time. "By whom?" he asked, and was not surprised when they answered, "By Paul."

After the last Paul was gone, he tried to think. Could he make his way out without them stopping him? His shoulder still throbbed when he moved that side of his body. His head hurt too, but the knife was mostly gone from his eye, and when it came was not nearly as severe, as if it were stabbing into a wound whose edges had already been cauterized, was just slightly tearing the fleshy edge of his brain. He was hardly at his best, but he was far from his worst. Was he in good enough shape to leave?

Over the course of the day, the paintings started to feel familiar, no longer so strange. True, they were grotesque, but it became harder and harder to keep that in mind. The screaming or singing man started to seem more and more incidental to the composition of the picture as a whole, and he found himself thinking about the pattern of ochres and blacks and clammy whites, about the cast of light and shadow, in a way he almost found soothing.

A Paul came in, a new one or a repeater, he wasn't sure. They had all started to look alike to him. The Paul held a dinner tray. Kline ate slowly. He was, he told himself, feeling much better.

"Paul," he said.

"Yes?" said Paul.

"I don't suppose you'd care to tell me what's going on here?"

"That is not for me to say," said Paul.

"I suppose not," said Kline. "I should wait for Paul then, should I?" Paul beamed, nodded. "Soon," he said. "No need to worry."

After Paul was gone, Kline lay thinking. He could get out of bed and when one of the Pauls came, as long as he was not a large Paul, he could probably feign weakness and then, while the Paul was unsuspecting, overpower him. He would hit him in the throat as hard as he could, or almost: not hard enough to kill him. Would it be hard enough? Would it be too hard? He kept thinking about it, imagining his hand flashing out, how the Paul's throat would feel to the blade of it, of the hand.

But no, he realized, he was now too curious to leave before finding out more about what was going on.

That night he had dreams of conflagration, scattered bits and fragments of burnings that seemed, he reflected later, to be assembled from many moments of smoke or fire, benign or otherwise, that he had experienced in his life. Yet in the midst of the fragments was a single roaring kernel: he saw himself, arm missing to the elbow, stumble out of a doorway and shoot a gun-handed guard through the head.
This is a dream
, he told himself, and was pleased that he could recognize this, though later there came gradually a nagging suspicion that it was not
just
a dream, had not always been a dream.

He shot the guard through the head and the man fell back gasping, hissing blood through his lips in a fine mist that slowly shadowed the floor beside his face. After a little while, the fellow seemed dead. Kline searched his pockets, found cigarettes, a book of matches. He used the matches to light the dead man's clothing on fire, then stood watching, making sure the flames started feeding up the wall.

Doors near him started to open and then quickly closed again. People were shouting. He stumbled his way down the stairs and shot a guard coming up, a lucky shot this time. A few seconds later he tripped over the man's body and fell the rest of the way down.

When he awoke it was to a man playing the piano, a careful, melancholy piece. He could only see the man from the back but could still tell he was blond and missing a hand. A Paul, certainly. He was playing one-handed but the piece didn't seem to be suffering as a result.

The piece slowed further, wound around itself, slowly died. The man stayed at the instrument, pedal down, letting the last notes resonate. One hand and half his body was hunched over the keyboard. The other arm, the stump, hung loosely at his side, as if each half of his body was controlled by a different brain. It was a curious and startling effect.

Eventually the notes faded utterly and both halves of the man's back finally relaxed to become a single back again. He swiveled around to regard Kline.

"Hindemith," he said. "Wittgenstein commissioned it--not the philosopher but his musical brother, Paul, who'd lost his arm in the war. He commissioned more than half a hundred one-handed piano pieces. He was a visionary."

Not knowing what else to say, Kline said: "Paul, I presume."

"Indeed," said the man, smiling slightly. Standing, he came to Kline's bedside.

"But you haven't always been called Paul, have you," said Kline.

"Perhaps the most successful of the pieces Paul Wittgenstein commissioned, philosophically speaking, is another one by Hindemith, which is a struggle even for a two-handed man to play well. And yet there is something about the stress it places on the fingers of the one-handed man that gives it a poignancy that a more relaxed, more confident two-handed approach is virtually unable to bring about. Hindemith had two hands, but when he wrote that piece it was as if he had only one. Do you play, friend Kline?"

"Play what?"

"The piano, of course," said the Paul.

"No," said Kline.

"Never learned?" said the Paul. "Took childhood lessons but never followed through?"

"Something like that," said Kline.

The Paul went back to the piano and struck a chord, let it resonate, then struck its tonic inverse.

"I of course have the advantage on you," said the Paul. "I've had my eyes on you for quite some time. You, on the other hand, have little if any idea who I am."