Zod Wallop (6 page)

“He looked right at me then. He’d been crying; his cheeks were wet with tears and his eyes were red. He smiled at me and he said, ‘It’s gone; I burned it.’ And I ran out of the room with Dr. Moore shouting behind me, and I ran down the hall to my room and yanked open the bottom drawer and the book was gone all right, and I walked back to group, and sat down and apologized to the other members for being disruptive—that’s good group therapy etiquette—and I caught my breath, calmed down. When I felt I was in control again, I made my move, came out of my chair fast, knocking it over, and got my hands around Raymond’s throat and banged his head against the floor and did what I could to make it clear to him that it was a bad thing, a very bad thing, to destroy an author’s only copy of his book. I think I might have got through to Raymond, or at least killed him, but Dr. Moore, a couple of orderlies, and a member of the group who had once played professional football intervened.”

Harry stopped talking and continued to stare out the window. All that remained of the sun was a yellow residue on the pond’s surface. Raymond and his friends were silhouetted against the water.

Helen spoke, “And then you wrote
Zod Wallop
as the world knows it?”

“Yes,” Harry said. His voice creaked a little, as though from disuse.

Helen Kurtis did not say anything, but the weight of her silence was in the shape of a question, and Harry’s answer to that question surprised him.

“I rewrote it because Raymond cried so,” Harry said. “He cried like a child that has just lost his mother and father in some disaster. He cried like his heart was broken.” Harry turned and looked at Helen. Harry shrugged. “It shook me up. I decided it wasn’t worth it to tell the truth. What the hell? I thought.
Give the lunatic his fairy tale
.”

Harry got up and said, “Let’s see if we can get these campers organized for the night. Raymond’s mother tells me that that poor brain-damaged girl really is Raymond’s wife. And Raymond tells me she’s the Frozen Princess.”

“Is she alive?” Lydia asked.

“She’s the Frozen Princess,” Lord Draining said, wiping the dead rat’s blood from his mouth, “and the whole world is inside her. She can’t talk, but we communicate. I know her thoughts. She wants me to pass them on to you, dear Lydia.

“She says she hates you, Lydia. She hates the way the blood jumps in your veins, and the way you laugh and clap your hands when Rolli does a somersault, and the way your heart beats like a bouncing ball. She says you are all wrong and don’t even know it, and it makes her angry. She says you have stolen love that was rightfully hers, and she will take it back. She says that the Midnight Machine will open you up and get it, this love.”

“I’m sorry she feels that way,” Lydia said.

Lord Draining chuckled. “Oh, you don’t know sorry yet,” he said.

I W
ROTE
I
T
because Raymond cried
, Harry thought, walking back out into the cool of the evening. Was it really that simple? Those days at Harwood seemed like a bad dream.

As he walked back down toward the pond where Raymond and his friends now stood, a car’s engine coughed and caught, the sound sharp and authoritative in the twilight. Harry turned to see the monkey, screaming, scramble from the open window of Raymond’s car.

What
? Harry thought.

The car began to move forward.

“Raymond,” Harry said, turning back to Raymond Story and his friends. Raymond’s voice was rising and falling in the near dark—the way it had so many times in group. A voice that ran after thoughts like a hyperactive child roaring through a room full of toys, breathless, dazzled by the wealth of treasures.

“Raymond!” Harry shouted. The car was coming faster now, moving toward them, rocking and bouncing down the hill toward the pond. The monkey had leapt from the car and now shrieked in its wake.

Raymond saw it then, broke from his companions and ran toward the approaching vehicle, bellowing. “Emily! Emily!”

The girl
, Harry thought.
The girl’s in the car
.

Harry raced after Raymond who ran with his arms waving frantically, as though the air were underbrush, hindering his progress. It was a big man’s awkward, lumbering gait, but it closed the distance quickly, too quickly, and Raymond was suddenly in front of the onrushing car and Harry shouted, “No!”

But the universe that heeds the injunctions of human voices was not in attendance, and indeed, the car seemed to turn, with a quick, animal awareness, as though sensing Raymond. Raymond stopped in mid-rush and leaned backward, arms still flaying the air, and he would have cleared the car’s path but for its sudden, arbitrary lunge.

The car’s fender caught Raymond, a glancing blow, and sent him hurtling backward into Harry. They fell together, rolling in the grass.

Harry was on his feet immediately, or so he thought, but there must have been some lapse of time, some jostled brain cells temporarily off-line. For when he looked, the car was already fifty feet away, accelerating as it approached the pond, and as he began to run, he heard himself shout, irrationally, “Wait!”

Regally, with the abstract precision of pure, ugly chance, the big car sped to the edge of the pond, rumbled unerringly onto the wood-planked pier—anyplace else and it would have foundered in the shoreline mud—banged down the runway of the pier and sailed, defiantly and leisurely, into the air. It hit the water in a great explosion, a dinosaur doing a belly flop, and was gone in a hiss, the water closing over it, a thousand startled frogs silenced in mid-song.

Harry ran to the end of the pier, kicked off his shoes, and dove. Instantly, the black water enfolded him, chilled his heart, and declared, “There is no hope; there never was.”

The darkness was absolute, and full of the silence of a trapped scream.
No
, Harry thought.
Not this time
.

He clawed downward to the bottom of the pond.

You are not going to find her
, the dark water said.
She’s already dead. Best thing for the poor girl.

This is not a deep pond
, Harry thought, ignoring the water’s voice.
And it’s a big car
.

He touched bottom, feeling, for a moment, disoriented, as though a muddy ceiling loomed over him. He crouched on the bottom, shouted her name with his soul.
Emily
! Could the car have hit bottom, engine still roaring, and driven on into the center of the pond? It was not a deep pond but it was wide. The car—with poor, dead Emily lying on its floorboards—could be far away from this dirty patch of silt. A bubble of white panic bobbed to the top of Harry’s brain.

Surely the water would have stopped the engine’s heart; the gluelike mud would have embraced the massive automobile. The car had to be nearby.

Harry moved in what he hoped was an ever-widening circle. Sand roiled around him, an abrasive cloud of gnats.
I’ll drown here too
, he thought. His lungs ached at their sudden poverty, and the thought of drowning was not entirely repugnant; it was a death that had its logic and symmetry.

The darkness was not complete. He saw his hand move in the water. Light. Harry saw the light and swam toward it. It seemed to recede as he swam—perhaps it was the cold light of his mind—and then, abruptly, he banged against the side of the car.

The driver’s side door was partially opened, and the overhead light was on. There was also a dull whine in his ears, a sound that seemed to mirror the ache in his lungs. Only later did he identify that sound: it was the car’s grating alarm.

Peering through the open window, Harry saw Emily. She had fallen to the floor, facedown, her hair drifting upward like seaweed, one of those harsh, flashed images in the aftermath of some newsworthy tragedy.
Dead
, the water said.
Way past alive. You’ve got just about half a minute before you join her
.

The driver’s side door refused to open any farther. The bottom was buried in mud. The car was tilted toward Harry. Harry clambered over the car’s roof. He found the passenger side door.

It’s locked, of course
, the water told him.
We couldn’t have her falling out, could we
?

The door opened.

You don’t know everything
, Harry thought.

As he opened the door, the creature came for him. He staggered backwards, falling, and he saw it above him, a black, writhing shape, and he saw the red glow of its eyes and the thrashing of its long, stalked neck and its hideous, undulating flatness. It rushed by—screaming, it was screaming—and was gone, and his mind instantly patched this crack in its rationality with the word fish and he caught Emily by the shoulders and dragged her out of the car and brought her to the surface where the giant Allan caught them and dragged them to the reedy bank.

Emily’s lifeless eyes gazed at the vast, indifferent sky, and Harry, vaguely aware of Raymond crying, said, “No,” and he knelt beside the girl and tilted her head back. Dirty water spilled from her mouth; he leaned forward and began to breathe for her.

Harry did not doubt for a moment that she would breathe again. Suddenly her lungs would catch, the habits of life would reassert themselves, the heart would beat. He knew this would happen because he had visualized it all so precisely. He knew it would happen because, in a thousand replayed moments of excruciating remorse, he had brought Amy back to life in just this way.

Except he hadn’t been there that time.

Breathe, damn it
.

Raymond leaned over Harry. “It’s my fault,” Raymond said. “I shouldn’t…it was not right…”

It’s never anybody’s fault
, Harry thought,
because there is nothing you can ever do
. That was what the black water had been trying to tell him, and it was nothing but the truth.

Harry continued to breathe and count, mechanically filling and emptying the girl’s lungs.

He breathed, watched her chest rise in phony life, saw in blurred, bug’s eye perspective, the length of her body: yellow T-shirt rucked up to reveal her pale, mud-splattered stomach, blue jeans black with water, her feet encased in what must have been brand-new tennis shoes, New Balance, black with bright yellow Ns.

Emily coughed, flipped on her side, and vomited.

“She’s alive!” Raymond shouted.

The pretty girl whose name was Rene spoke. Her voice was loud in the surrounding silence. “Jeez. Of course she’s alive.”

Harry lifted the resurrected girl in his arms. “It’s okay,” he said.

Cradling the girl in his arms, surrounded by shadows, Harry started to walk to the house, but his knees disappeared, and he would have fallen if he hadn’t been caught. Raymond took the girl and kept on toward the house while someone—the giant— helped Harry to follow.

Harry looked up and saw that the stars had come out. Like a thousand thousand cars at the bottom of an immense lake, tiny map lights flickering against inevitable night. Were their doors ajar, did they make a noise until their batteries ran down?

He was getting a little punchy, but that was all right. He would sleep in triumph, his fatigue a badge of honor. He had done it; he had saved her.

Harry was helped through the door of the cabin, and he watched as Emily, who had been divested of her wet clothes and wrapped in Helen’s flannel nightgown, suddenly arched on the bed and began to die in earnest.

Harry ran to the side of the bed, pushed past Raymond and Helen, and pressed his ear to Emily’s chest.

It was a sound he had never heard before, but he had seen the sound before. He had seen it on the monitor, there in the ER. Harry had heard the intern shout: “We got v-fib here!” That patient, an overweight, red-faced man who had come to the hospital from a restaurant when he had begun to experience sharp chest pains had been promptly hooked up to the EKG monitor, had suffered another attack, and had died.

Emily’s heart was beating wildly, like some lost sparrow trapped in a chimney. She’d failed to drown, but there were other ways to die. Her heart had gone into ventricular fibulation.

Four years working in an emergency room right after college would now pay off. Harry would be able to tell his companions just what it was that had killed Emily.

But he was powerless to prevent it.

If he had been in a hospital…if he just happened to have a crash cart handy…if—

They put the paddles on the big man’s chest and his body jumped and Harry had been reminded of a documentary, seals being clubbed on a beach, skinned, white carcasses plundered.

Harry’s eyes fell on the lamp he had been repairing. Well, why not? He had absolutely nothing to lose. Except this: he was no doctor. What if she was not dying? This first aid would kill her, surely it would kill her.

For a moment, he leaned over the girl, but there were no answers in the mask of her closed face, her blue lips, the mute, dark O of her mouth. Then Harry moved. Because he knew, beyond any logic except a sure knowledge of how life was for him, Harry Gainesborough, that if he did not act she would die, that the surest sort of murder would be to do nothing. This was the truth in his life, and since he was the person who was, well, here, then there was only one possible solution: Act.