The Witching Hour

  "I saw it in the incubator, this little fetus. Do you know what he called it? He called it the abortus. Oh, I hate to tell you this because I know how you feel about Little Chris, I know ... "

  She didn't notice his shock. He had never told her about Little Chris, never told anyone about that pet name, but she seemed quite completely unaware of this, and he sat there silent, just listening to her talk, thinking vaguely of all those films he'd seen with these recurrent and awful fetal images, but he wasn't about to interrupt her. He wanted her to go on.

  "And this thing had been sustained, alive," she said, "from a four-month abortion, and you know he was developing means of live support for even younger fetuses. He was talking of breeding embryos in test tubes and never returning them to the womb at all, but all of this to harvest organs. You should have heard his arguments, that the fetus was playing a vital role in the human life chain, could you believe it, and I'll tell you the horrible part, the really horrible part, it was that it was utterly fascinating, and I loved it. I saw the potential uses he was describing. I knew it would be possible someday to create new and undamaged brains for coma victims. Oh, God, you know all the things that could be done, the things that I, given my talent, could have done!"

  He nodded. "I can see it," he said softly. "I can see the horror of it and I can see the lure."

  "Yes, precisely," she responded. "And do you believe me when I tell you I could have had a great career in research, I could have been one of those names in the books. I was born for it, you might say. When I discovered neurology, when I reached it, you might say, after all the preparation, it was like I'd reached the summit of a mountain, and it was home, it was where I belonged."

  The sun was rising. It fell on the floorboards where she stood but she appeared not to see it. She was crying again, softly, the tears just flowing as she wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand.

  She explained how she had run from that laboratory, she had run from research altogether, and all that might have been achieved there, she had run from her ruthless lust for power over the little fetal cells with their amazing plasticity. Did he understand how they could be used for transplants wholly unlike other transplants, that they continued to develop, that they did not trigger the usual immune responses of the host, that they were a field of such dazzling promise. "That's what it was, you could see no end to what could be done. And imagine the extent of the raw material, a little nation of nonpersons by the millions. Of course there are laws against it. Do you know what he said? 'There are laws against it because everybody knows it's going on.' "

  "Not surprising," he whispered. "Not surprising at all."

  "I had killed only two people at that point in my life. But I knew, inside, that I had done it. Because you see it's connected to my very character, my capacity to choose to do something, and my refusal to accept defeat. Call it temper in its crudest form. Call it fury at its most dramatic. And in research can you imagine how I could have used that capacity to choose and do and to resist authority, to follow my lights on some totally amoral and even disastrous course? It's not mere will; it's too hot to be called will."

  "Determination," he said.

  She nodded. "Now a surgeon is an interventionist; he or she is very determined. You go in with the knife and you say, I'm going to chop out half your brain and you're going to be better, and who would have the nerve to do something like that but someone very determined, someone extremely inner-directed, someone very strong."

  "Thank God for it," he said.

  "Perhaps." She smiled bitterly. "But a surgeon's confidence is nothing compared to what could have been brought out of me in the laboratory. And I want to tell you something else, too, something I think you can understand on account of your hands and the visions, something I would never tell another doctor, because it would be no use.

  "When I operate I envision what I'm doing. I mean I hold in my mind a thorough multidimensional image of the effects of my actions. My mind thinks in terms of such detailed pictures. When you were dead on the deck of the boat and I breathed into your mouth, I envisioned your lungs, your heart, the air moving into your lungs. And when I killed the man in the Jeep, when I killed the little girl, I first imagined them punished, I imagined them spitting blood. I didn't have the knowledge then to imagine it any more perfectly than that, but it was the same process, the same thing."

  "But they could have been natural deaths, Rowan."

  She shook her head. "I did it, Michael. And with the same power guiding me I operate. And with the same power guiding me I saved you."

  He said nothing, he was only waiting for her to go on. The last thing he wanted to do was argue with her. God, she was the only person in the world it seemed who really listened to him. And she didn't need anyone to argue with her right now. Yet he wasn't at all sure that she was right.

  "No one knows these things," she said. "I've stood in this empty house and cried and talked aloud to no one. Ellie was my closest friend in all the world, but I couldn't have told her. And what have I done? I've tried through surgery to find salvation. I have chosen the most brutal and direct means of intervention. But all the successful operations of the world cannot hide from me what I am capable of. I killed Graham.

  "You know, I think that at that moment, when Graham and I were there together, I think ... I think I actually remembered Mary Jane on the playground, and I think I actually remembered the man in the Jeep, and I believe, I believe I actually intended to use the power, but all I can remember is that I saw the artery. I saw it burst. But you know, I think I deliberately killed him. I wanted him to die so he couldn't hurt Ellie. I made him die."

  She paused as if she wasn't sure of what she'd just said, or as if she'd just realized that it was true. She looked off over the water. It was blue now, in the sunlight, and filled with dazzling light. Countless sails had appeared on the surface. And the whole house was pervaded by the vistas surrounding it, the dark olive hills sprinkled with white buildings, and to Michael, it made her seem all the more alone, lost.

  "When I read about the power in your hands," she said, "I knew it was real. I understood. I knew what you were going through. There are these secret things that set us apart. Don't expect other people to believe, though in your case they've seen. In my case no one must ever see, because it must never happen again ... "

  "Is that what you're afraid of, it will happen again?"

  "I don't know." She looked at him. "I think of those deaths and the guilt is so terrible, I don't have a purpose or an idea or a plan. It stands between me and life. And yet I live, I live better than anybody I know." She laughed softly, bitterly. "Every day I go into surgery. My life is exciting. But it isn't what it could have been ... " Her tears were flowing again; she was looking at him, but seemingly through him. The sunlight was falling full on her, on her yellow hair.

  He wanted so to hold her. Her suffering was excruciating to him. He could scarcely stand to see her gray eyes so red and full of tears, and the very tautness of her face made it terrible when the lines of anguish suddenly sharpened and flashed and the tears flowed, and then the face went smooth, as if with shock, again.

  "I wanted to tell you these things." she said. She was confused, uncertain. Her voice broke. "I wanted ... to be with you and tell you. I guess I felt that because I had saved your life, maybe somehow ... "

  This time nothing could have stopped him from going to her. He got up slowly, and took her in his arms. He held her, kissing her silky neck and her tear-stained cheeks, kissing her tears. "You felt right," he said. He drew back, and he pulled off his gloves, impatiently and tossed them aside. He looked at his hands for a moment, and then he looked at her.

  There was a look of vague wonder in her eyes, the tears shimmering in the light from the fire. Then he placed his hands on her head, feeling of her hair, and of her cheeks, and he whispered: "Rowan." He willed all the random crazy images to stop; he willed himself just to see her now, through his hands, and there
rose again that lovely engulfing sense of her that had come and gone so swiftly in the car, of her surrounding him, and in a sudden violent hum, like the throb of electricity through his veins, he knew her, he knew the honesty of her life, and the intensity of it, and he knew her goodness, her undeniable goodness. The tumbling, shifting images didn't matter. They were true to the whole that he perceived, and it was the whole, and the courage of the whole, that mattered.

  He slid his hands into her robe, touching her small, thin body, so hot, so delicious to his naked fingers. He lowered his head and kissed the tops of her breasts. Orphan, alone one, afraid but so strong, so very relentlessly strong. "Rowan," he whispered again. "Let this matter now."

  He felt her sigh, and give in, like a broken stem against his chest, and in the mounting heat, all the pain left her.

  He lay on the rug, his left arm bent to cradle his head, his right hand idly holding a cigarette over the ashtray, a steaming cup of coffee at his side. It must have been nine o'clock by now. He'd called the airline. They could put him on the noon plane.

  But when he thought of leaving her he was filled with anxiety. He liked her. He liked her more than most people he'd ever known in his life, and more to the point perhaps, he was enchanted by her, by her obvious intelligence and her near morbid vulnerability, which continued to bring out in him an exquisite sense of protectiveness, which he enjoyed almost to the point of shame.

  They had talked for hours after the second lovemaking.

  They talked quietly, without urgency or peaks of emotion, about their lives. She'd told him about growing up in Tiburon, taking out the boat almost every day of her life, what it had been like attending the good schools. She'd talked more about her life in medicine, her early love of research, and dreams of Frankenstein-like discoveries, in a more controlled and detailed way. Then had come the discovery of her talent in the Operating Room. No doubt she was an incredibly good surgeon. She felt no need to brag about it; she simply described it, the excitement of it, the immediate gratification, the near desperation since the death of her parents to be always operating, always walking the wards, always at work. On some days she had actually operated until she could not stand upright any longer. It was as if her mind and her hands and her eyes weren't part of the rest of her.

  He had told her briefly, and a little self-deprecatingly, about his own world, answering her questions, warmed by her seeming interest. "Working class," he had said. How curious she had been. What was it like back there in the South? He'd talked about the big families, the big funerals, the narrow little shotgun house with its linoleum floors, the four o'clocks in the postage stamp of a garden. Had it seemed quaint to her? Maybe it did to him too now, though it hurt to think of it, because he wanted to go home so badly. "It isn't just them, and the visions and all. I want to go back there, I want to walk on Annunciation Street too ... "

  "Is that the name of the street where you grew up? That's so beautiful."

  He didn't tell her about the weeds in the gutters, the men sitting on the steps with their cans of beer, the smell of boiled cabbage that never went away, the riverfront trains rattling the windows.

  Talking about his life here had been a little easier--explaining about Elizabeth and Judith, and the abortion that had destroyed his life with Judith; explaining about the last few years, and their curious emptiness, and the feeling of waiting for something, though he did not know what it was. He told about houses and how he loved them; about the kinds that existed in San Francisco, the big Queen Annes and the Italianates, the bed-and-breakfast hotel he had wanted so badly to do on Union Street, and then he had slipped into talking about the houses he really loved, the houses back there in New Orleans. He understood about ghosts in houses, because houses were more than habitats, and it was no wonder they could steal your soul.

  It was an easy exchange, deepening their knowledge of each other, and amplifying the intimacy they'd already felt. He had liked what she said about going out to sea; about being alone on the bridge with the coffee in her hand, the wind howling past the wheelhouse. He didn't like it, but he liked to hear her tell about it. He liked the look in her gray eyes; he liked the simplicity of her easy, languid gestures.

  He had even gone into his crazy talk about the movies, and the recurrent images of vengeful babies and children, and the way he felt when he perceived such themes--as though everything around him was talking to him. Maybe one step from the madhouse, but he wondered if some of the people in the madhouse were there because they took the patterns they perceived too literally? What did she think? And death, well, he had a lot of thoughts about death, but first and foremost, this thought had recently struck him, even before the accident, that the death of another person is perhaps the only genuine supernatural event we ever experience.

  "I'm not talking about doctors now. I'm talking about ordinary people in the modern world. What I'm saying is, when you look down at that body, and you realize all the life has gone out of it, and you can scream at it, and slap it around, and try to sit it up, and do every trick in the book to it, but it's dead, absolutely unequivocally dead ... "

  "I know what you're saying."

  "And you have to remember, for most of us we see that maybe once or twice in twenty years. Maybe never. Why, California in this day and age is a whole civilization of people who never witness a death. They never even see a dead body! Why, they think when they hear somebody's dead that he forgot to eat his health foods, or hadn't been jogging the way he should have been ... "

  She had laughed softly under her breath. "Every goddamned death's a murder. Why you do you think they come after us doctors with their lawyers?"

  "Exactly, but it's deeper even than that. They don't believe they're going to die! And when somebody else dies, it's behind closed doors, and the coffin's closed, if the poor slob had the bad taste to even want a coffin and a funeral, which of course he shouldn't have wanted. Better a memorial service in some toney place with sushi and white wine and people refusing to even say out loud why they are there! Why, I have been to California memorial services where nobody even mentioned the dead guy! But if you really see it ... and you're not a doctor, or a nurse, or an undertaker ... well, it's a first-class supernatural event, and just probably the only supernatural event you ever get to see."

  "Well, let me tell you about one other supernatural event," she'd said, smiling. "It's when you've got one of those dead bodies lying on the deck of your boat, and you're slapping it around and talking to it, and suddenly the eyes do open, and the guy's alive."

  She had smiled so beautifully at him then. He had started kissing her, and that was how that particular segment of the conversation had come to an end. But the point was, he hadn't lost her with his crazy rambling. She had never once tuned out on him.

  Why did this other thing have to be happening? Why did this feel like stolen time?

  Now he lay on the rug, thinking how much he liked her and how much her sadness and her aloneness disturbed him, and how much he didn't want to leave her, and that nevertheless, he had to go.

  His head was remarkably clear. He had not been this long without a drink all summer. And he rather liked the feeling of thinking clearly. She had just refilled the coffee for him, and it tasted good. But he'd put back on the gloves, because he was getting all those random stupid images off everything--Graham, Ellie, and men, lots of different men, handsome men, and all Rowan's men, that was abundantly clear. He wished it wasn't.

  The sun was burning through the eastern windows and skylights. He could hear her working in the kitchen. He figured he ought to get up and help her no matter what she'd said, but she'd been pretty convincing on the subject: "I like to cook, it's like surgery. Stay exactly where you are."

  He was thinking that she was the first thing in all these weeks that really mattered to him, that took his mind off the accident and off himself. And it was such a relief to be thinking of someone other than himself. In fact, when he considered it with this new clarit
y, he realized he'd been able to concentrate well since he'd been here, concentrate on their conversation and their lovemaking and their knowing of each other; and that was something altogether new, because in all these weeks, his lack of concentration--his inability to read more than a page of a book, or follow more than a few moments of a film--had left him continuously agitated. It had been as bad as the lack of sleep.

  He realized that he had never had his knowledge of a human being commence at such a pitch, and plunge so deep so fast. It was like what was supposed to happen with sex, but seldom if ever did. He had entirely lost sight of the fact that she was the woman who'd rescued him; that is, a strong sense of her character had obliterated that vague impersonal excitement he'd felt on first meeting her, and now he was making mad fantasies about her in his head.

  How could he continue to know her and maybe even get to love her, and have her, and do this other thing he had to do? And he still had to do this other thing. He still had to go home and he had to determine the purpose.

  As for her having been born down south, it had nothing to do with it. His head was full of too many images from his past, and the sense of destiny that united these images was too strong for it to have come from some random reminder of his home through her. Besides, on the deck of the boat last night, he'd caught nothing of that. Knowing her, yes, that was there, but even that was suspect, he still believed, because there was no profound recognition, no "Ah yes," when she told him her story. Only positive fascination. Nothing scientific about this power of his; might be physical, yes, and measurable finally, and even controllable through some numbing drug, but it wasn't scientific. It was more like art or music.

  But the point was, he had to leave, and he didn't want to. And it made him sad suddenly, sad and almost desperate, as if they were somehow doomed, he and she.

  All these weeks, if only he could have seen her, been with her. And the oddest thought occurred to him. If only that awful accident hadn't happened, and he had found her in some simple ordinary place, and they had begun to talk. But she was part and parcel of what had happened, her strangeness and her strength were part of it. All alone out there in that big awful cruiser right at the moment when darkness fell. Who the hell else would have been there? Who the hell else could have gotten him out of the water? Why, he could easily believe what she said about determination, about her powers.