“Hello, Daddy,” she said miserably.
Now Conrad smiled in spite of himself. He pulled Jessica’s Big Bird quilt up and tucked it in under her chin. He kissed her softly on the forehead.
“What’s an awake child doing in my house?” he whispered.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Well, you know, we gotta wake up kind of early tomorrow. We’re gonna take a drive in the country. See all the leaves changing colors.”
“I know. But I’m scared,” Jessica said.
“What are you scared about?”
She gave a pitiful sniffle. “I’m scared about Frankensteins,” she said. “There was a Halloween show on the Disney Channel and there were Frankensteins in it and now I’m scared about them.”
“Uh-oh,” Conrad said.
“And Mommy already told me there are no Frankensteins in real life. But I’m not scared about them in real life.”
“Oh. Well, where are you scared about them?”
“In my mind.”
“Ah.”
A single tear fell from the child’s eyes. It rolled over her nose and was sopped up by the plush of the faithful Moe. “Mommy says they’re only in my mind. And when I close my eyes, I can see them in there. That’s what I’m scared about.”
For a moment, Conrad could only nod at her. “Wow,” he said finally. “That is a tough one.”
“I know. And I can’t sleep.”
“Whew.” Conrad scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “How about if I sing you a song?”
“You can’t sing, Daddy.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot. Okay. Let me think.” He scratched his jaw some more. His daughter watched him solemnly. Moe absorbed another tear. “All right,” Conrad said finally. “I’ve got it. We’ll chase the monsters away.”
Jessica sniffled. “How can you chase monsters away if they’re only in my mind?”
“It’s very simple,” Conrad said, “but it’ll cost you a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, now, close your eyes.”
“But then I see the monsters.”
“Well, you gotta see the monsters if you want to chase them away, right?”
She nodded. She closed her eyes.
“You see them?” Conrad asked.
She nodded again.
“Now,” said Conrad, “imagine a torch.”
She opened her eyes. “I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a stick with fire on top of it.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah.” She closed her eyes again. “Okay.”
“Okay, now wave the torch at the monsters.”
“Why?”
“Because Frankensteins hate fire. They always run away from fire.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw the movie.”
“Oh.”
“Now stick the torch in their faces. You see them running?”
Slowly, her eyes still shut, Jessica began to smile. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”
Conrad leaned forward and kissed her forehead again. “Good night, sweetheart,” he whispered.
“Good night, Daddy.”
He walked back into the living room. Agatha lifted her face from her hands. She shook her head at him. “You’re my hero,” she said.
“For chasing away imaginary monsters?”
She smiled lazily. “It’s a living.”
He made love to her that night troubled by a fierce sense of longing.
He had never made love to any other woman. He had eyed enough of them on the street. He had fantasized, he sometimes thought, about all of them: naked, crying out for him. There were certain days in early spring when he thought he would die if he didn’t possess some young creature passing by him in her new flowery skirt. But in the event, it was always Agatha. It was her eyes, welcoming and faintly amused. Her breasts, the feel of her breasts, which made him ache for their old days together. It was the way she sucked her breath in sharply when she came, the way her eyes filled. In the event, that was usually enough.
That night, though, he made love to her, and the ache, the longing, wouldn’t go away. He kissed her, he whispered her name. Her fingers brushed at his neck, dug into his back. And he felt empty, almost homesick. As if there were something that had eluded him in life. Something he wanted desperately but could never have.
Agatha arched her back, sucked in her breath. Her eyes filled. Her tears spilled over. And Conrad, with a whisper of panic, felt himself losing his erection.
He seemed to know instinctively what he had to do. He closed his eyes. He murmured, “Aggie. I love you.” And he thought about Elizabeth. He thought about the whiteness of her flesh, the flush of her cheeks. The sudden nakedness of her small, exquisite breasts as the unbuttoned shirt was pulled away from them … “Don’t you want to touch me?”
The husband and wife came together and lay breathing hard in one another’s arms.
It was just past ten. Even with his eyes closed, Conrad could tell. He could hear Mr. Plotkin spitting.
Leo Plotkin was a retired garment worker who lived in the apartment directly above the Conrads. He was a cranky old Jewish guy who hadn’t spoken to Conrad since he’d seen him carrying a Christmas tree into the elevator. At a minute past ten o’clock, like clockwork every night, Conrad and Aggie could hear him spitting. His loud hawks came directly through the heating duct from his bathroom into theirs. Conrad called it The Ten-O’Clock Cheh. You could set your watch by it.
When he heard it tonight, Conrad opened his eyes and looked at Aggie. She glanced back at him and laughed. She nestled close to him, her head on his chest. He looked down at her hair for a long moment. He breathed in the scent of it.
“Can I ask you a really stupid question?” he said after a while.
Agatha lay with her head on his chest. She was playing quietly with his nipple. He was breathing in the scent of her hair.
“That depends,” she whispered. “Can I ridicule and belittle you for it?”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
“Then shoot.”
Conrad took a deep breath. Then he said, “Do you think—I mean, laying aside all the God stuff, and the, you know, supernatural business—do you think human beings have souls?”
“Oh, jeez,” Agatha said. “You know, I deal with publishing people most of the time—but I suppose it’s possible in theory. What exactly do you mean?”
“Well, I mean, do you think you could talk to a person, like a psychotic, you know, or an advanced Alzheimer’s patient—or say a person with multiple personalities—someone whose ego is shattered beyond recognition—and yet still find some essential individuality in them? Some—self—that remained no matter what?”
“Nah.”
Conrad laughed. “Oh.”
She turned her face up and gave him a quick kiss under the chin. “If you go crazy on me again,” she whispered, “I get the car and the apartment.”
He nodded, smiling.
And Agatha said softly, “There’s no soul. You just die. You’re forty. Life is hard. Go to sleep.” She kissed him again. Then she rolled over. Within seconds, her breathing deepened and he knew he was alone.
He stopped smiling. He gazed up at the ceiling.
If you go crazy again.
It was odd how it happened, he thought. Going crazy, breaking down. It was odd how it seemed to you that you were growing, getting wiser. That you were having revelations into the ways of the world. That you were suffering, but also achieving a measure of enlightenment. And all the while, in fact, you were standing still. Standing still while the garrote of your neurosis tightened around your neck.
That day after his mother died he had felt fine. Strong, in fact. The Nathan of those days—the long-haired college kid in the colorful T-shirts—felt he had risen above such base emotions as grief. Oh, sure, he was not above some petty emotions. He was a little annoyed, for example, that his father had waited so ma
ny hours to call him. (Dad said he didn’t see the point of waking him up for bad news.) And of course, he was … saddened by the loss of his mother. But grief? That was for the unenlightened.
Mom had stumbled into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea in the middle of the night, Dad had told him. She was drunk, of course. She was wearing a flowing silk nightgown. Nathan remembered it: it was white with a print of violet chrysanthemums. She had turned on the gas burner, Dad said. And she had reached out to lay the teapot on. As she did, the burner’s blue flame licked up and caught at her loose, flowing sleeve. Dad said the nightgown must have gone up like paper. But Nathan couldn’t help thinking, maybe if she had been sober, she’d have gotten out of it. Maybe if someone had been there other than Dad …
Dad said Mom had lingered through the night. Nathan didn’t like to think about that. He didn’t like to think about the sound of his father crying over the telephone either. Other than that, though, all in all, he felt strong. He was at peace, he told a doubtful Agatha. He was perfectly serene. Through his meditation, through his study of Zen, he was transcending the dualism of life and death, he told her. Time itself, in which his mother had perished, was a mere illusion. Anyone could see that.
Before catching the red-eye back to New York, he went up to Seminary Hill to meditate.
It was his favorite time of day. Just sunset. The sun was falling into the bay on a cushion of clouds. The clouds were pink and lavender and green. They rolled and turned and expanded with the wind. Nathan sat on a large flat rock. He arranged his legs in the half lotus—the full lotus was too hard on his knee. He counted his breaths, pushing them out with his abdomen. He let his mind sink away. He stared into the sun. He sank into samadhi, the state of perfect concentration.
It was a half hour before anyone found him. A professor of Southern literature, an attractive young woman, was the one. She had strolled up the hill to watch the stars come out. She stopped on the grassy slope when she first spotted him. She figured he was a drunk. He was stumbling around in the twilight, his hands out in front of him. Annoyed, but cautious, the professor was about to turn around, head back to the street. But then she heard him cry out. It was a high-pitched cry of anguish. She leaned into the twilight and listened. She heard him sobbing. She took another step toward him.
“Are you all right?” she called.
“My eyes!” he cried out to her. “Jesus Christ! My eyes!”
The young teacher had put her caution aside. She had run to him, taken him by the shoulders.
“Oh, my mother,” Nathan had sobbed. “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. My eyes.”
He was completely blind for two days. He attended his mother’s funeral with his head wrapped in bandages. Agatha had to lead him to the graveside by the arm. He had looked down into the open hole and seen nothing. He had had to imagine the coffin. His mother inside the coffin. His mother’s open eyes, staring at him.
I’m still in here.
Lying in bed now, Conrad reached out and patted his wife’s hip. Poor Aggie, he thought. Even then, it had taken her weeks to convince him to go see a psychiatrist. When he finally did, it had taken him another six months to admit he had had a breakdown. It had taken ten years for him to feel he had recovered from it. By then, of course, he was a psychiatrist himself.
And the eye, like his knee, still bothered him sometimes. Long days and little sleep made it ache. He would see red flashes—like afterimages of the clouds around the setting sun.
If you go crazy again …
He let his hand slide off of Aggie. He stared up at the ceiling. Until it happened, until he had cracked, he had not known. He had not realized there was anything wrong at all.
He closed his eyes. He breathed slowly. There she was. There she was before him. Her long silken hair like gold. Her high cheeks, her white, white skin. The opening halves of her unbuttoned shirt. Elizabeth.
Don’t you want to touch me?
She was so beautiful, Conrad thought. He began to drift into sleep.
She was so beautiful.
The radio alarm went off at eight A.M. A newscaster was saying that a private plane had crashed in a residential area near Houston. Conrad turned the radio off. He sat up in bed.
He had slept soundly. His knee was stiff. He stretched it out, grimacing. He slid it carefully over the side of the bed. He got up and limped gingerly into the bathroom. He took a shower, letting the warm water pound at his knee. He had had another dream, he thought. Something about a hospital. He tried to remember but the images drifted apart like clouds. He got out of the shower. Dried himself and wrapped the towel around his middle. He stepped out of the bathroom and there was Agatha, waiting. She smiled at him, her eyes half closed.
He kissed her. “How’d you sleep?”
“Mm, good. The sleep of the sexually satisfied.”
She went past him into the bathroom. He headed back to the bedroom. His knee felt better now.
He looked out through the bedroom curtains. The day was gray but it wasn’t raining. That would be all right, if the rain held off. He went to his closet and got dressed while Agatha showered. He put on jeans and a peach, button-down cowboy shirt. Probably should wear a sweatshirt for a day in the country, he thought. But he wasn’t comfortable in sweatshirts. He wasn’t comfortable in anything really, except gray suits.
As he finished buttoning the shirt, he returned to the window. He pulled the curtains open.
Aggie came out of the bathroom then. He turned and caught a glimpse of her as she went by the door. She was heading for the kitchen, belting his white bathrobe around her. A moment later, he heard her voice calling, “Wake up, munchkin. Rise and shine.”
He went into the living room. Agatha was setting cereal boxes down on the dining table. Raisin bran for him, granola for her, Rice Krispies for the kid. She returned to the kitchen, singing out as she went, “Wake up, sleepyhead. We don’t wanna get caught in traffic.”
Conrad sat down at the table. Aggie returned with bowls and the milk.
“Those rotten Frankensteins kept her up so late,” she said. “It’ll be noon before we get out of here.” She went back to the nursery.
“Sweetheart. Wake up now.”
Conrad smiled. He poured some raisin bran into his bowl.
“Nathan?” Aggie spoke from behind him. “Is Jessie awake already?”
“What do you mean?” He reached for the milk. He sniffed at it to make sure it hadn’t gone sour.
“She’s not in her bed,” said Agatha.
Conrad poured the milk on his raisin bran. “What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s not in her bed,” said Agatha. She walked across the living room toward the bathroom. “Did she wake up already? Jessie?” she called.
Conrad set the milk down and listened. He heard Aggie’s voice from the bathroom. “Jessie?” she said again.
Conrad pushed his chair back. He got up and went toward the nursery. “What do you mean she’s not in her bed?” he muttered. “Where would she be?”
He heard Aggie calling in the bedroom now, “Jessie? Are you in here? Sweetheart?”
Conrad went into the nursery. The loft bed was empty. Jessica’s Big Bird quilt was pushed down to the bottom of the mattress. The stuffed turtle was gone.
She must be in her closet, Conrad thought. She went in there sometimes to play with her toys in private.
He went to the closet and looked in. There was an open space cleared on the floor for her. It was surrounded by stuffed animals. But Jessie wasn’t there.
He went back into the living room. Agatha was waiting.
“Did you find her?” she asked.
“No, did you look in the bedroom?”
“Yes. She’s not there.” Agatha gave him a puzzled little smile. “Where’d she go?”
“She must be in the bedroom,” Conrad said. “Where else can she be?”
Conrad went into the bedroom himself. Agatha followed him. As soon as he looked in, he could tell the
room was empty. Still, he glanced into the closet. He checked on the far side of the bed by the window. He looked up at his wife, puzzled.
“Nathan?” she said.
“Where is she?” said Conrad.
Then Aggie’s mouth opened. “Oh, Jesus, the balcony,” she said.
“She knows not to go out there,” said Conrad. But when his wife hurried out of the room, he followed after her quickly.
Aggie got there first, opened the glass doors. She stepped out onto the balcony. Conrad came up behind her. He saw her take a deep breath as she stepped to the rail. She looked over it into the courtyard below. Conrad stood behind her. He waited for her to turn, dreading it.
When she did turn, he was relieved to see her.
“No,” she said. “It’s all right.” Then she looked at him. “Where …?”
They both went back into the living room. They turned this way and that, looking aimlessly.
“Jessica,” Aggie called. “Are you hiding?”
“Jessica,” Conrad called in a commanding voice. He looked behind one of the chairs. Aggie went to the front closet and looked in there.
“Jessica,” Aggie said. “Don’t hide, sweetheart. You’re scaring Mommy.” She turned away from the closet. Conrad saw her face was tense now. Her brow was creased. Her lips turned down. “Jessica.”
Conrad, on an inspiration, bent down and looked under the dining room table. He expected to see Jessica crouched under there, grinning, gripping her Turtle Tot. He expected to hear her shout “Boo!” and start giggling.
She wasn’t there.
“Jessica,” Aggie said again.
Conrad heard her voice tremble. The sound made him swallow hard.
“Sweetie,” she said, “don’t hide, okay? Really. I mean it, sweetheart, it scares me.”
She looked at Conrad again. She clutched the front of the bathrobe closed at her throat. “You don’t think she went out in the hall, do … ?”
Then she stopped. Her eyes had shifted. They had moved from him to the front door. Conrad saw her cheeks go ashen. He saw a look on her face of such blank, stupid terror that his own heart seized in his chest like a dry engine. His limbs felt weak.