The Witching Hour (6 page)

He knew he had been happy before he drowned, not perfectly happy, but happy. His life had been good.

The morning of the big event, he had awakened late, needing a day off, and it was a good time for it. His men were doing just fine out there, and maybe he wouldn’t check on them. It was May 1 and the oddest memory came back to him—of a long drive out of New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast to Florida when he was a boy. It must have been the Easter vacation, but he really didn’t know for sure, and all those who would have known—his mother, his father, his grandparents—were dead.

What he remembered was the clear green water on that white beach, and how warm it had been, and that the sand was like sugar under his feet.

They had all gone down to the waves to swim at sunset; not the slightest chill in the air; and though the great orange sun still hung in the blue western sky, there was a half moon shining straight overhead. His mother had pointed it out to him. “Look,
Michael.” Even his father seemed to love it, his father who never noticed such things had said in a soft voice that it was a beautiful place.

It had hurt him to remember this. The cold in San Francisco was the one thing he powerfully resented, and he could never tell anyone why afterwards—that such a memory of southern warmth had inspired him to go out that day to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Was there any place colder in all of the Bay Area than Ocean Beach? He had known how drab and forbidding the water would look under the bleached and sullen sky. He had known how the wind would cut through his clothes.

Nevertheless he’d gone. Alone to be at Ocean Beach on this dim, colorless afternoon with visions of southern waters, of driving with the top down on the old Packard convertible through the soft caressing southern wind.

He didn’t turn on the car radio as he drove through town. So he didn’t hear the high tide warnings. But what if he had? He knew Ocean Beach was dangerous. Every year people were washed out, natives as well as tourists.

Maybe he’d been thinking a little about that when he went out on the rocks just below the Cliff House Restaurant. Treacherous, yes, always, and slippery. But he wasn’t much afraid of falling, or of the sea, or of anything. And he was thinking about the south again, about summer evenings in New Orleans when the jasmine was blooming. He was thinking of the smell of the four o’clocks in his grandmother’s yard.

The wave must have knocked him unconscious. He had no memory at all of being washed out. Just that distinct recollection of rising into space, of seeing his body out there, tossed on the surf, of seeing people waving and pointing, and others rushing into the restaurant to call for assistance. Yes, he knew what they were doing, all of these people. Seeing them was not really like looking down on people from above. It was like knowing all about them. And how purely buoyant and safe he’d felt up there; why, safe didn’t even begin to describe it. He was free, so free he could not comprehend their anxiety, why they were so concerned about his body being tossed about.

Then the other part began. And that must have been when he was really dead, and all the wonderful things were shown to him, and the other dead were there, and he understood, understood all the simplest and the most complex things, and why he had to go back, yes, the doorway, the promise, shot down suddenly and weightlessly into the body lying on the deck of the ship, the body that had been dead drowned for an hour out there, into the aches and the pains, and come back alive staring up,
knowing it all, ready to do exactly what they had wanted of him. All that splendid knowledge!

In those first few seconds, he tried desperately to tell of where he’d been and the things he’d seen, the great long adventure. Surely he had! But all he could remember now was the intensity of the pain in his chest, and in his hands and his feet, and the dim figure of a woman near him. A fragile being with a pale delicate face, all of her hair hidden by a dark cap, her gray eyes flickering for a second like lights in front of him. In a soft voice, she’d told him to be calm, that they would take care of him.

Impossible to think that this little woman had gotten him out of the sea, and pumped the water out of his lungs. But he had not understood that she was his savior at that moment.

Men were lifting him, putting him on a stretcher, and strapping him down, and he was filled with pain. The wind was whipping his face. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. The stretcher was rising in the air.

Confusion after that. Had he blacked out again? Had that been the moment of true and total forgetting? No one could confirm or deny, it seemed, what had happened on the flight in. Only that they had rushed him to shore, where the ambulance and the reporters were waiting.

Cameras flashing, that he did recall, people saying his name. The ambulance itself, yes, and someone trying to stick a needle into his vein. He thought he heard his Aunt Vivian’s voice. He begged them to stop. He had to sit up. They couldn’t strap him down again, no!

“Hold on, Mr. Curry, just hold on. Hey, help me here with this guy!” They
were
strapping him down again. They were treating him as if he were a prisoner. He fought. But it was no use; they’d shot something into his arm, he knew it. He could see the darkness coming.

Then
they
came back, those he had seen out there; they began to talk again. “I understand,” he said. “I won’t let it happen. I’ll go home. I know where it is. I remember … ”

When he had awakened, it was to bright artificial light. A hospital room. He was hooked to machines. His best friend, Jimmy Barnes, was sitting next to the bed. He tried to speak to Jimmy, but then the nurses and the doctors surrounded him.

They were touching him, his hands, his feet, asking him questions. But he couldn’t concentrate on the proper answers. He kept seeing things—fleeting images of nurses, orderlies, hospital hallways.
What is all this?
He knew the doctor’s name—Randy Morris—and that he’d kissed his wife, Deenie, before he left home. So what? Things were literally popping into his head. He
couldn’t stand it. It was like being half awake and half asleep, feverish, worried.

He shuddered, trying to clear his head. “Listen,” he said. “I’m trying.” After all, he knew what this was all about, the touching, that he’d been drowned and they wanted to see if there had been any brain damage. “But you needn’t bother. I’m fine. I’m all right. I’ve got to get out of here, and get packed. I have to go back home immediately … ”

Plane reservations, closing the company … The doorway, the promise, and his purpose, which was absolutely crucial … 

But what was it? Why did he have to get back home? There came another flash of images—nurses cleaning this room, somebody wiping the chrome bat of the bed a few hours ago while he’d been asleep.
Stop it!
Have to get back to the point, the whole purpose, the—

Then he realized it. He couldn’t remember the purpose! He couldn’t remember what he’d seen while he was dead! The whole thing, all of it—the people, the places, all he’d been told—he couldn’t remember any of it. No, this couldn’t be. It had been wondrously clear. And they were depending on him. They’d said, Michael, you know you do not have to return, you can refuse, and he’d said that he would, that he … that he what? It was going to come back in a flash, like a dream you forget and then completely remember!

He had sat up, brushing one of the needles out of his arms and asked for a pen and paper.

“You have to lie still.”

“Not now. I have to write it down.” But there was nothing to write! He remembered standing on the rock, thinking of that long-ago summer in Florida, of the warm waters … Then the wet soaked cold aching thing that he was, on the stretcher.

All of it gone.

He had shut his eyes, trying to ignore the strange warmth in his hands, and the nurse pushing him back against the pillows. Somebody was asking Jimmy to go out of the room. Jimmy didn’t want to go. Why was he seeing all these strange irrelevant things—flashes of orderlies again, and the nurse’s husband, and these names, why did he know all these names?

“Don’t touch me like that,” he said. It was the experience out there, over the ocean, that’s what mattered!

Suddenly he reached for the pen. “If you’ll be very quiet … ”

Yes, an image when he touched the pen, of the nurse getting it out of the drawer at the hallway station. And the paper, image of a man putting the tablet in a metal locker. And the bedside
table? Image of the woman who’d last wiped it clean, with a rag full of germs from another room. And some flash of a man with a radio. Somebody doing something with a radio.

And the bed? The last patient in it, Mrs. Ona Patrick, died at eleven
A.M.
yesterday, before he’d even decided to go to Ocean Beach.
No. Turn it off!
Flash of her body in the hospital morgue. “I can’t stand this!”

“What’s wrong, Michael?” said Dr. Morris. “Talk to me.” Jimmy was arguing in the hall. He could hear Stacy’s voice, Stacy and Jimmy were his best friends.

He was trembling. “Yeah, sure,” he whispered to the doctor. “I’ll talk to you. Just so long as you don’t touch me.”

In desperation he had put his hands to his own head, run his fingers through his own hair, and mercifully he felt nothing. He was drifting into sleep again, thinking, well, it will come as it did before, she’ll be there and I’ll understand. But even as he nodded off, he realized he didn’t know who this
she
was.

But he had to go home, yes, home after all these years, these long years in which home had become some sort of fantasy … 

“Back to where I was born,” he whispered. So hard now to talk. So sleepy. “If you give me any more drugs, I swear I’ll kill you.”

It was his friend, Jimmy, who brought the leather gloves the next day. Michael hadn’t thought it would work. But it was worth a try. He was in a state of agitation bordering on madness. And he had been talking too much, to everybody.

When reporters rang the room direct, he told them in a great rush “what was going on.” When they pushed their way into the room, he talked on and on, recounting it again and again, repeating “I can’t remember!” They gave him things to touch; he told them what he saw. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

The cameras went off with their myriad shuffling electronic sounds. The hospital staff threw the reporters out. Michael was scared to touch even a fork or a knife. He wouldn’t eat. Staff members came from all over the hospital to place objects in his hands.

In the shower, he touched the wall. He saw that woman, that dead woman again. She’d been in this room three weeks. “I don’t want to take a shower,” she’d said. “I’m sick, don’t you understand?” Her daughter-in-law had made her stand there. He had to get out of the stall. He fell down exhausted in the bed, shoving his hands under the pillow.

There had been a few flashes as he first smoothed the tight leather gloves over his fingers. Then he rubbed his hands together
slowly, so that everything was a blur, image piling upon image until nothing was distinct, and all the various names tumbling through his mind made a noise—then quiet.

Slowly he reached for the knife on the supper tray. He was seeing something but it was pale, silent, men gone. He lifted the glass, drank the milk. Just a shimmer. All right! These gloves were working. The trick was to be quick about every gesture.

And also to get out of here! But they wouldn’t let him. “I don’t want a brain scan,” he said. “My brain is fine. It’s my hands that are driving me crazy.”

But they were trying to help—Dr. Morris, the chief resident, and his friends, and his Aunt Vivian who stayed at his side by the hour. At his behest, Dr. Morris had contacted the ambulance men, and the Coast Guard, the Emergency Room people, the skipper of the boat who had revived him before the Coast Guard had been able to find her—anybody who might have remembered his saying something important. After all, a single word might unlock his memory.

But there were no words. Michael had mumbled something when he opened his eyes, the skipper had said, but she hadn’t been able to make out a specific word. It began with an L, she thought, a name, maybe. But that was all. The Coast Guard took him up after that. In the ambulance he’d thrown a punch. Had to be subdued.

Still, he wished he could talk to all those people, especially the woman who’d brought him around. He told the press that when they came to question him.

Jimmy and Stacy remained with him late each night. His Aunt Vivian was there each morning. Therese finally came, timid, frightened. She didn’t like hospitals. She couldn’t be around sick people.

He laughed. Wasn’t that California for you, he thought. Imagine saying something like that. And then he did the impulsive thing. He ripped off the glove and grabbed her hand.

Scared, don’t like you, you’re the center of attention, knock it off all this, I don’t believe you drowned out there, ridiculous, I want to get out of here, I, you should have called me.

“Go on home, honey,” he said.

Sometime during the silent hours, one of the nurses slipped a silver pen into his hand. He’d been sound asleep. The gloves were on the table.

“Tell me her name,” she said.

“I don’t get her name. I see a desk.”

“Try harder.”

“A beautiful mahogany desk with a green blotter on it.”

“But the woman who used the pen?”

“Allison.”

“Yes. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try again.”

“I tell you I don’t know. She gave it to you, and you put it in your purse, and this morning, you took it out. It’s just images, pictures, I don’t know where she is. You’re in a cafe, and you’re drawing on the napkin with the pen. You’re thinking about showing it to me.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know, I told you. I don’t see it. Allison, that’s all I see. She wrote a grocery list with it, for Chrissakes, you want me to tell you what was on the list?”

“You have to see more than that.”

“Well, I don’t!” He put back on the gloves. Nothing was going to make him take them off again.