Memento Mori (Part Two)
Memento Mori
I had to get out of here. Out of our apartment. Off our street. Away from our town. I had to stay busy, keep my mind occupied, or I would go insane. I thought of seeing Irene in the mirror at the hospital and felt sick. I couldn’t let myself fall apart like that. I ran to the bathroom and turned the shower as hot as it would go. I closed my eyes and let the scalding water clean my skin and clear my mind. When I stepped out and stood dripping in my towel, I felt almost myself.
I fumbled behind the faucet for my glasses and put them on and the world settled into focus. The hot air from the shower had clouded my mirror, so I wiped a spot clean with a corner of my towel. My face floated in the misty void of the wet mirror and I watched myself frown at what I saw. I have always been prone to developing dark circles beneath my eyes when I don’t get enough sleep, and it’s only gotten worse with age. But, the image in my mirror looked as if it had not slept in weeks, if not months. The circles beneath my eyes had deepened to livid bruises and my skin looked sallow, almost greenish. The odd color of my skin made my veins stand out like a map of the New York subway system tattooed across my face.
What had that so-called doctor of medicine given me while I was passed out yesterday? It had to be more than cogentin - a muscle relaxant can’t make you look that awful when you wake up in the morning. I shook my head, feeling sick. Something had been done to me, and I didn’t know what. The only person who might know was Cliff. He’d taken me to the hospital, so he might have seen what Dr. Jiang did to me. At the very least, he could help me rule out whether not this had anything to do with my visit to the hospital.
I went in to the main room and moved the papers around on my desk until I uncovered my cell phone. I picked it up and got about halfway through punching in Cliff’s number before I glanced at the clock on the wall. Cliff would be at the dig with some of the students from one of the classes he was covering for me and he never answered his phone when he was working. It was a matter of personal pride to him. I would have to drive out to the dig if I wanted to talk to him, and that meant shaving and getting dressed.
I walked back to the bathroom and got out my razor and shaving cream. I soaped up and ran the razor over my jaw, only half paying attention to what I was doing. It wasn’t until I reached the tricky part under my chin and down my neck that I really had to look in the mirror. I peered intently at the white shaving cream covering my throat and felt more than saw a flicker of motion outside of the clear space on the mirror. A flash of red, misty as if seen through a veil of rain, and the suggestion of a face. I couldn’t stop myself from whirling around to see if someone was behind me. There was no one, and by the time I turned back the only face in the mirror was my own.
A trickle of blood dripped down my throat from where, in my distraction, I’d cut myself. Three purple drops ran down my neck and caught in the curve of my collar bone. I blinked twice, hard, and my own face looked back at me each time, sallow and bloodshot, but mine. Whatever I had seen before, it was gone. I pulled off a piece of toilet paper to blot my neck, but the cut had stopped bleeding. I traced its edge with one finger. It gaped open right above one of my veins and it looked deep, but the wound was dry. I shrugged at myself in the mirror. None of this made sense.
I rushed to my room to start dressing. I couldn’t stay here one minute longer. I would go to the dig. Cliff would be there with my students. I could ask him about what had happened at the hospital and look around and see if there had been any interesting finds. It would be good to get out, get fresh air. I wouldn’t be alone.
It was about a fifteen minute drive to the dig site over roads winding between cattle pastures and stands of trees just beginning to turn red. The air had the silvery, electric taste it gets before rain, but the clouds scudding across the sky were thin and empty of promise. I parked in an empty field and, shivering, pulled my overcoat out of the trunk and buttoned all the way up to my chin. It was a long walk uphill out to the dig site and I was already cold. The ground was dry, but when it rained, we would sink in mud up to our knees.
I could hear a thin barking in the distance, probably Indy. Indy - short for Indiana Jones, of course - is the exact size, shape, color, and texture of a mop. Despite this, I have seen him bend himself in half catching a Frisbee twice his size and drag it back to me. Cliff found Indy while digging in Pennsylvania. He claims he heard Indy barking and it led him to the site of his greatest find, which was buried just beneath the tip of the dog’s tail. Because of this he firmly believes that Indy has a sixth sense for finding artifacts and, as yet, I have been unable to disprove his theory.
As I came up over the edge of the hill, I heard Indy’s excited barking from behind the trees. I walked toward the sound. The small dog exploded out of the bushes, trailing a tangled leash, and made straight for my leg. His ears lay flat against his head and he growled once low in his throat. I stopped. Cliff moved fast at the heels of the dog, reaching for the leash just outside of his grasp.
Some part of my brain knew something was wrong, even as I bent over to scoop the furry dynamo into my arms and spare Cliff the trouble of the chase. I felt a sharp pain in my leg and yelped, falling over backward and scrambling away from the dog dashing for my head. Cliff lifted him out of the way, muttering curses and giving me time to pick myself up. My pants leg was torn through and underneath I could see a double row of tooth marks running around my ankle. After the initial pain of the bite, it hardly hurt, but I could see dark fluid pooling in the cuts.
I looked up. Indy cowered against Cliff’s chest, whining and shaking as he tried to bury his nose in Cliff’s arm pit.
“Oh my God! Are you okay? What the hell happened?” asked Cliff, transferring Indy to one arm so he could help me up with the other. He looked more upset than I was.
I ignored the arm, pulling my self up. “I think I’m okay, but I have no idea what happened, other than, you know, the obvious.”
“I’m so sorry, man. I can’t believe he bit you. You know how he is. If a robber came to the house, Indy would show him where I keep the good china in exchange for a belly rub.”
“You have good china?”
“Yeah. My mom gave it to me. Don’t you dare say anything.”
“My lips are sealed.”
“Good. Let’s get you bandaged up and then I’ll deal with Dr. Jones here.” He transferred his grip to keep the dog from leaping over his shoulder and onto the ground and I hobbled after him back to the dig site. Cliff had brought a folding chair out with him and I sank gratefully into it, stretching out my leg. As soon as Cliff had handed Indy off to the nearest responsible-looking student, he grabbed his first aid kit and brought it over.
“Here, let me take a look at the leg.”
“I can handle it.”
“Just because you took a first aid class as an undergrad does not make you a medical expert.”
“Apparently you taking a dog training class a few years ago doesn’t mean a heck of a lot either.”
Cliff stumbled back at my tone of voice. “Look, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened. If there’s any way I can make this up to you-“
He would have kept going if I hadn’t cut him off. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m just in some pain. Let me deal with the bandaging, okay? I’ll use plenty of Neosporin.”
I cuffed back the edge of my pants, wincing as threads brushed against the open wound.
“Hmm…it’s not bleeding much at all,” I muttered to myself, bent almost double to inspect my own ankle. “The wound must not be as deep as it looks, so I shouldn’t need stitches.”
Cliff glanced over skeptically.
“Just pass me the bottle of Neosporin and don’t you dare mother at me.”
He handed each of the things to me as he spoke and I started cleaning out the wound as best as I could. There was hardly any blood, just a trickle of some brownish-green fluid - probably some kind of plant sap I’d brushed against. Afterward, I smeared a thick layer of Neosporin over it and tied on the bandage. My ankle felt wobbly, but not hot the way an infection feels. If anything, my ankle felt cold, like the wind touched me there more than anywhere else. I settled myself more comfortably into the chair.
“You want me to help you back to your car? I can probably leave these guys alone for a bit without them misclassifying too many artifacts. It’s pretty much just sheep bones anyway.”
“Thanks, but I actually came here because I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“We could talk on the way. You look god-awful, man. Pardon my French.”
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Okay. The explanation for this one should be interesting.” He crouched down next to my chair, careful to keep his coat from dragging on the ground.
“What happened while I was unconscious at the hospital?”
“I don’t know. I sat in the waiting room. Why?”
“Well, I woke up the morning after I got back from there and I look, as you put it, god-awful. I wanted to know what Dr. Jiang gave me, besides cogentin that is, that might have side effects like this.”
“Simon, you want to know what happened while you were unconscious - here it is. Dr. Jiang saved your life. After you passed out, you started convulsing, sort of. Dr. Jiang said your muscles had contracted to a third of their normal length. They were tearing themselves apart. I’d never seen anything like it.”
“But-“
“No. It looked like you were going to die, Simon. Don’t blame the doctor, just quit the paranoid head-trip and take care of yourself. When was the last time you ate anything?”
“Um, I don’t know.”
“I have a ham and cheese sandwich in a bag somewhere under the chair. Eat it.”
“Isn’t that your lunch?”
“I’m trying to lose weight, anyway.”
Cliff ambled away, leaving me to grope in the darkness under the chair to find his sandwich bag. Try as I might, I couldn’t convince myself to do more than nibble at the corners. On the far side of the dig site, a stray beam of light found its way between the clouds to make a red-headed girl’s hair glow like a gold coin. I thought again of Irene as I first saw her, red-hair dark with rain, burying her hands in the warm mud, reaching into the ground as if she could pull out its secret heart. The girl crouched to look at something between two roots of a tree and her burning hair passed into shadow. The empty space beneath my ribs filled with lead. I coughed and turned away.
I had come here to escape these long moments of self-reflection and self-pity. I pulled myself to my feet and limped over to where some of the students worked. I could smell earth and desiccated leaves and the expectant scent of rain. I could hear the intermittent thock-thock of shovels hitting stones and the grunts of hard labor. I could see the remains of stone walls in which people had lived a century ago, now overgrown with wild grass and the puffball heads of dandelions. I would not look at the red-headed girl whose hair glowed like a gold coin. I would not cry.
“Professor Cleary?”
“Yes?”
I looked over my shoulder at a tall young man - one of the students in my 101 class. His name came to me a moment later, Johnny.
“I, uh, I wanted to say how sorry I am and everything. It’s terrible what happened.”
I nodded, unable to open my mouth enough to speak.
“Um, also, Mariella wanted me to tell you she found something weird.”
I took a deep breath. I couldn’t let my mind wander in front of my students. I couldn’t grieve. I had to be their teacher.
“Was it another sheep skull?” The ex-slaves who had lived on this land had continued working for their former owner after they were freed, raising and breeding sheep from New Zealand. Most of the finds that excited the students were the bones of sheep that they liked to tell each other, when they thought Cliff and I were out of ear shot, were really the remains of horribly mutated humans.
“No,” replied Johnny, “But it has bones in it. Little ones - like maybe from a bird.”
“Don’t move the artifact. I’ll help you catalog it and then we’ll move it together.”
Johnny led the way over to the girl with the red hair. The sun had passed behind a cloud again and her hair no longer glowed, but it was still the same color as Irene’s. Otherwise, Mariella looked nothing like her. I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking of the image I had seen in the hospital and again in my bathroom mirror. Whatever was happening to me, it had not escaped from the mirror into my life.
“Hey, Professor, look.” Mariella ceased hopping up and down with excitement and crouched to point at something half buried.
It had been red once, but had faded to a brown that matched the pit in which they had found it. The outlines were that of a bag made of rough cloth and cinched shut with a rotted-through strand of rope. The seam along one side had burst open, speckling the objects inside with dirt. I could see the protruding edges of small bones, the winking eyes of glass beads gone dull with age, and behind them, impressed in the cloth, the twisty shadow of John the Conqueror root. It smelled of the deep places in the earth and morning glories, and I could almost feel my spine straighten.
“So, what is it?” Mariella’s voice broke my reverie.
In an attempt to get them to take this seriously, I put on my most professorial voice. “It is what is generally known as a mojo bag, although in the francophone tradition it may be referred to as gris-gris, which has several variant spellings that-” I paused, realizing I had lost my students. “In the African-American tradition of hoodoo - evidently practiced by the family living in the house we are currently excavating - the mojo bag is a type of magic charm used to bring good luck. Typically they’re worn under the clothing, but, judging by the placement of this piece, I’d say this one was purposefully buried in front of the house as a ward against evil influences.”
“Weird.” Johnny this time.
“Not at all, really. Most cultures create some sort of talisman to ward off evil. I’m sure you can think of other examples if you try.”
Johnny looked away, more thoroughly reprimanded than I had intended. I crouched down and reached into my coat pocket, pulling out a small brush. I reached into the pit Mariella and Johnny had dug and began to wipe flecks of dirt off the fabric. I felt the coarse edge of the cloth brush the underside of my fingers as I clumsily shifted weight. The sore muscles I’d had since the morning I collapsed to the floor and had to be taken to the hospital unclenched themselves. Some tight thing in my chest unclenched and my lungs expanded. Joint aches I hadn’t even known I had faded. The dull, heavy feeling I’d been carrying in my stomach passed, and I was suddenly ravenously hungry.
The backs of my eyelids were like a movie screen on which I could see a woman like and unlike my Irene. Her skin was white as sickness and her hair floated around her head in a fiery halo. Her eyes were green as a cat’s. But the freckles on her cheekbones and the curve of her neck were familiar. I had seen that upturned nose, those curving lips, that pointed chin, every morning I had woken up next to my wife. She pressed herself against the wrong side of a mirror reflecting an empty room. I could see her dress, the white one with the pink rosettes on the collar, the one that Irene was buried in. Her long-nailed hands clawed the glass, seeking purchase. She snarled, lips drawing back to reveal rows of sharp, white teeth and the pointed red tongue that ran over them. Her eyes, green as glacial ice and just as cold, found mine and I stumbled back, pulling my hand away from the mojo bag.
The image vanished and my chest tightened and the aches in my muscles and joints returned with staggering intensity. I fell backward into a sitting position, sucking in air through clenched teeth. I wasn’t hungry anymore.
“You okay, Professor?” Mariella’s face close to mine, mouth contorted with worry.
I couldn’t help myself after what I’d just seen; I recoiled. I scooted backward, trying to put distance between myself and the red-haired girl. I had to calm myself. I couldn’t let my students see me like this. They deserved better. I tried to compose my face into calmer lines, but they only looked at me with more worry.
“Look, why don’t you go talk to Cliff - Professor Radcliff that is - and get him to help you. I need to…” My sentence trailed off lamely. I didn’t know what I needed to do other than go someplace else.
I pushed myself awkwardly to my feet and walked off before they could ask me more questions. I had no answers. None at all. Looking back over my shoulder when I reached the crest of the hill, I could see the black silhouettes of Johnny and Mariella gesturing animatedly in front of the larger darkness that was Cliff. My mind felt too heavy to wonder what they said.
I couldn’t go home and I couldn’t stay here. My mind was playing tricks on me. Sunlight glancing off a girl’s hair had made me feel so full and so hollow, like all I had inside me was a scream shaped like a name. I bit my lips to keep them closed so I wouldn’t scream aloud - Irene. I walked, vision blurring with tears I refused to shed, back to the car. I sat in the front seat with my hand hovering, ready to move from park to drive, but my mind blank. Tears slid soundlessly down my eyelashes and ran over the lenses of my glasses, streaking them with the patterns of rain falling on windows. I felt too empty to be sad.
I took off my glasses and cleaned the lenses. I ran the sleeves of my coat roughly over my eyes. I couldn’t just sit here in a parked car half a mile from the dig site and think about Irene trapped behind glass. I had to go somewhere. I switched the car into drive. I would go to the pool at the St. Stephen’s gym. I’ve always been able to think more clearly underwater, as if the brief escape from gravity and solid surfaces loosed some bonds on my brain. When I told Irene about this, she’d said it made sense.
“Why?” I asked.
“You’re a Scorpio, which, even though it’s supposed to be a scorpion, is a water sign. So, it makes sense you’d love swimming.”
“And you’re a Pisces, which is the fish one, right?” She nodded. “So, unless I miss my guess, you are also a water sign.”
She nodded again, smiling. “I’ll make an astrologer out of you yet.”
“So, what does that mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“Us both being water signs. Your column - it’s all about looking at people’s zodiac signs and seeing if their compatible and whatnot. Well, what about us. Are we compatible?”
I snuggled down next to her, putting the tip of my nose against the soft skin of her neck.
“It’s not that easy. I mean, two water signs, it can go either way.” She pulled away slightly, tapping her index finger against her front two teeth as she thought. “On one hand, it means we’ll always understand each other. We’ll have a bond that can’t be broken. On the other hand, sometimes, two water signs together can get dangerous. They can lose themselves in each other and never find their way out.” She pulled closer to me, smiling slightly. “But, of course you don’t believe in any of this.”
I shook my head. “Not really, but I can think of worse people to lose myself with.”
“Aren’t you a charmer.”
“I try.”
I ran my hand over my face, pushing away the memory, and pulled into the faculty parking lot. I got out of the car and the slam of the door as I closed it echoed behind me for a moment as I walked up to the gym. The sun hung behind the trees edging the hill behind the gym so that its light seemed to compress the view before me into two dimensions. It seemed to me for a moment like a child’s charcoal drawing - the sort of thing that might have “my house” written in clumsy letters above it in the paper-white sky. The front door squeaked as I opened it. I nodded to the student at the front desk, someone I’d had in class a year or two ago, who didn’t need to check my ID to know I was a professor here and entitled to use the facilities. Even from here the chlorine smell was strong enough to burn my nostrils.
I looked down over the swimming pool from the viewing windows before heading down to the locker room to change. From above the pool was a perfect turquoise rectangle. Of course, if you scooped the water into your hand, it would be clear, not turquoise. The color came from the tiles at the bottom of the pool, tiles at the bottom of every pool designed to convince us that water was meant to be the color of a semi-precious stone. Still, there was something right about the turquoise color and the astringent smell of chlorine in my nose.
I walked down to the side of the pool, swim trunks bunching around my legs. I left my glasses on an abandoned pool chair with a duct tape red cross on the back, the college’s sop to life guard duty, and plunged into the pool. I sunk beneath the water, eyes open, and the scream that I’d held so long trapped in my lungs left me in a cloud of air bubbles rising silently to the surface.
The first time I brought Irene here, I remember, she wore a green and yellow paisley bikini with a tie in the back that always looked like it was about to come untied and gigantic wraparound shades. She said sunglasses were an integral part of the swimming experience and couldn’t be neglected even if the pool was indoors. I jumped in right away, but she’d sat on the side, kicking her feet to send little waves to splash me in the face when I surfaced.
I caught her feet and slid my hands up along her legs to her thighs, pulling her into the water with me. I kept one hand on the wall, while she wrapped arms and legs around me, her mouth on mine so hard I could barely breathe. Her hand teasing at the waistband of my swim trunks. My hand untying the knot in her bikini top. The top drifted away, carried by one of the wavelets made by her kicking feet, and her breast floated free on top of the water, dappled with freckles except for two perfect circles of pure white skin around the raised red mound of each nipple. The bright red and green of her tattoo glowed underwater like some rare tropical fish. My swimsuit joined hers, lost in the water, and we sunk together to the bottom of the pool. Her hands tangled in my hair. My hands traced the curve between her legs. I moved inside her, so warm in the surrounding cold water. She gasped bubbles of air in a column to the surface, eyes closed, skin blue in the aquarium light, like a mermaid with her hair a nimbus of fire around her head.
Tightness in my chest pulled me from my reverie. I gasped, sucking in water instead of air. My nose hovered centimeters above the tile floor of the pool. Far above, the florescent lights filtered down to me through the water, deep blue and wavering as ghosts. I swam to the surface, spitting water and choking on air. That wasn’t how it had happened. We’d come to the pool together and I’d dragged her in with me. We were about to kiss when a couple of students from my freshman seminar showed up with an inflatable volleyball and started stringing up a net across the pool. We’d climbed out of the water, suddenly shy, me walking a step behind her to hide the awkward bulge of my swim trunks.
I paddled to the side of the pool and pulled myself out and knelt a moment, dripping wet, staring at my reflection. Without my glasses, my vision blurred and what looked back at me seemed almost doubled. I shook my head and climbed unsteadily to my feet. It had seemed so real, more real, almost, than what had really happened. I picked up my glasses off the lifeguard’s empty chair and settled them on my nose, heedless of the wet. I went back to the side of the pool and gazed in. There was my reflection. Brown hair beginning to gray at the temples, overlong nose, the beginnings of a paunch around my middle. The blue of the water made my image seem darker than it should be, almost purple.
The water seemed to cloud for a second, or perhaps I blinked, and she was next to me. Her white arms around me, her naked body pressed against my side, her mouth so close to my neck that I could almost feel her hot breath, but I felt nothing. She was there in the water with my reflection. Her freckled thighs. Her flaming hair. Her green cat’s eyes. Her sharp, red mouth, brushing my reflection’s throat. But, I felt nothing. I reached into the water as if I could lift her out, but was left staring at my empty reflection.
I dipped my hand once more into the water. Cold. I left my hand there until it began to feel numb. My mind was playing tricks on me again. I’d run out of our apartment after seeing her, run all the way to the dig, and then I’d run from there to the pool. But she had followed me everywhere. There was no place in my life that I had not brought her, which was not thick with the memories of her. But I didn’t want to escape her, did I? Whatever was happening in my mind, it was probably the last chance I had to see my wife. I smiled slightly and grabbed a towel out of the bin and headed for the changing room. This was a gift. I would go home.
I toweled dry, staring into the warped green metal of a row of lockers. My face stared back. I blinked. Even in the dull reflection of the dented metal, I could tell something was wrong. Something was wrong with my face. I squinted and peered closer, but couldn’t get the image to resolve beyond a sense of something-is-not-right. I ran into the men’s bathroom and almost did not recognize myself in the mirror that spanned the back wall behind the sinks. The air was heavy and blurred the image with condensation. I went up close to the mirror, almost afraid to clear a space to look in.
Dark lines crisscrossed my brow and traced the edges of my eye sockets. They outlined my cheekbones and the folds of my jaw and I could see them disappearing into the parts of my throat hidden by condensation on the glass. I wiped off more of the mirror with my towel. Thick bands of reddish-brown ran down from my cheeks, through my throat, and met beneath my solar plexus at my heart. I knew what this meant. I shivered and every hair on my body stood at attention.
I had had blood poisoning once, when I’d fallen and cut open my elbow hiking to a dig in China. I hadn’t been able to get water I trusted to clean my wound, so I’d let it go. I ended up in the hospital three weeks later, a single black vein snaking its way up my arm, over my shoulder, and down almost to my heart. I crouched down on the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees. When I’d gotten back to Beijing, the doctor had told me that, if I’d waited any longer, the infection would have reached my heart. And, he said, if the infection reaches your heart, you die. It was as simple as that.
Could it be the dog bite? The stitches in my head? No, infection like this takes time - a slow dark line growing by millimeters along a single vein. This was different. Every vein and artery rusted dark. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Air rushed in and out too fast to catch in my lungs, and I leaned into the sink to support myself. My hand caught on the handle and cold water spurted onto my chest. I didn’t look down. My hands were shaking too much to turn the water back off.
I stared into the mirror, unable to break eye contact with myself, as the brown of my veins shifted to a sick green, like something left out in the sun to rot. My chest burned from lack of air. The green lines spread over my body like ink, tracing the large veins and arteries, spreading into the fine capillaries. My body doubled, forcibly wrenching my eyes from the mirror, as I vomited yellowish fluid into the white sink. I watched it spiral down the drain with the water, wiping my mouth on the corner of a towel. The room smelled astringent, like unripe fruit and rotting gums. I couldn’t stay here. I had to go home.
I pulled my shirt on without bothering with half the buttons. I left the belt off my pants. Somehow I made it to the car and I have no idea how I got home. I don’t remember anything about the drive home except a smell - still water and rotting rose petals, rancid sugar and black earth. I staggered into our apartment and collapsed on the couch, unable to make it as far as the bedroom. The world swam against my half-closed lids a moment and then I was gone.
I was back in the dark place with a single band of light across my vision. I strained my eyes to see two figures bathed in light - a tall man in a priest’s black clothes and white collar, and a slight woman with red-hair in a black dress. I strained toward her, but as before I could not move even to blink. The priest put his hand on the woman’s shoulder, but she shrugged it off and turned toward me. She kneeled down until her face filled my vision - Irene. Her eyes were swollen with tears, turning her deep green eyes almost gray, but she spared me the smallest of smiles. “I love you,” her lips said without sound, “I love you.” I struggled against unbending muscle and rigid tendons to raise my hand even a fraction of an inch to caress her face, but could do nothing. Irene raised her hand and blotted out my light.
I lay unmoving in total darkness. I could feel the narrow walls that confined me against my shoulders and knew I should be afraid, but I was not. All I could think about was Irene’s face, tears locked up in her eyes unable to escape. I don’t know how long I waited in the dark before I felt motion, but just as I was beginning to try to discern the direction of my travel, a banging noise began. The banging reverberated, growing louder and louder, accompanied by a high and repetitive two-note ring. Some distant part of me, a phantom limb of my conscious mind, knew what this was and what it meant and pulled me up into the waking world.
I pulled myself to a see seated position. Cliff was using his patented method of getting into people’s homes at all hours of the night, banging on the door with one hand while repeatedly hitting the doorbell with the other. If I didn’t get up soon, he’d add shouting my name repeatedly to the mix.
“Simon! Simon, I know you’re in here. Answer the goddamn door!”
My next door neighbors would try to get me evicted if this went on too much longer. I stood up and shuffled to the door and pulled it open.
“What?”
“I wanted to say I was really sorry about Indy biting-“ He paused mid-thought and stared at me, mouth ajar. “Good God, man, you look awful. What the hell happened to you?”
I shrugged.
“It looks like blood poisoning. You should really go to the hospital.”
“They’ll just tell me what I already know.”
“Which is…?” He shouldered past me into the apartment and pulled the door closed behind both of us.
“That it’s psychosomatic.”
“How the hell could it all be in your head? I can see that you look like shit.”
“I-“ I paused, unsure how, or if, to go on. “It’s complicated.” I sat down on the couch and he pulled up a kitchen chair to face me. “I’ve been seeing Irene. At the pool, the dig, the hospital, even in the bathroom mirror. She looks alive. I saw her buried, I know-but, she looks, she looks…She was so young, Cliff. People shouldn’t die that young. I’m old, I mean, older, and-”
“That’s survivor’s guilt, Simon,” Cliff interrupted, “If you could have saved her, you would have. You were always after her to wear a seatbelt…”
“That’s what I mean. Worrying about wearing a seatbelt, it’s worrying about death. You have to be a certain age to think about death like that, like it’s personal. It would be obscene for her to have to think like that. About her own death.”
“Simon - and I never thought I would say this - but, you have to put the anthropology lesson away. Intellectualizing death, it doesn’t make it easier. You just have to live through it. It’s what Irene would want.”
“How do you know what my wife would want?”
“Don’t be stupid, Simon. She loved you; of course she’d want you to be happy.”
I laughed, because it was better than crying.
“Dwelling on this isn’t good for you. Let’s talk about something else.”
Silence stretched between us.
Finally, Cliff spoke, “History’s Mysteries is having a special on the holy grail. I won’t even make fun of you for getting all mad when they bring in British historians, when we know five people better in the U.S.”
I smiled. Cliff was my best friend for a reason. With an effort of will, I forced everything that had happened from my head. I needed a moment of normal life, even if it was just a moment. “They just have Brits on because it sounds more ‘authentic.’ All the really important grail research has been happening here ever since Don Foreman moved to Boston. Everyone knows that.”
He clicked the TV on. “That’s what I mean. There’s nothing better for grief than getting pissed off about something stupid.” He paused. “I’m getting a beer.”
“Get me one too.”
“Looking like that? Hell, no.”
“It’s my beer!”
“And you aren’t drinking any of it.” He got up and walked into the kitchen and I heard the whooshing sound of the fridge opening.
I closed my eyes. I could be normal for Cliff. This is what I’d been trying to do all day, after all, get my mind off of it. Maybe this would help. If it was psychosomatic, then Cliff was right, dwelling on it would only make it worse. I opened my eyes.
Carefully keeping my voice light, I shouted over my shoulder, “Get back here quickly or you’ll miss the panning-across-totally-irrelevant-friezes part of the show.”
“As long as I don’t miss the bearded re-enactors in period inappropriate colorful cloaks, I’ll be fine,” he said, plopping down on the couch and putting his feet up on the displaced kitchen chair.
I dozed off and on, catching about half the episode and trying not to drool too obviously on my collar. My eyes were only half open when I heard the music of the credits.
“Hey, Simon,” Cliff said, clapping me on the back, “I’m going to have to crash here tonight. I am way too drunk to drive home.”
I glanced over at the beer bottle on the table. He’d barely touched it. He glanced surreptitiously at me with suddenly clear eyes and I understood. He was worried about me. He knew if he asked to stay over to make sure I was okay, I’d send him packing. So, by pretending to be drunk, he gave himself an ironclad excuse to spend the night and keep an eye on me. I thought for a moment of calling him on it, but was too tired for the resulting argument.
“Yeah, that brand is a bit stronger than most. The fold-out bed in the couch has sheets on it already and there should be an old comforter in the linen closet. I can’t promise it won’t be pink or have flowers on it, though.”
“That’s fine. I’ll take care of it. You get to bed.”
He didn’t have to say it twice. I barely managed to change from street clothes to pajamas before crawling under the covers and falling asleep. My dream began in darkness where the other dream had left me. I was being carried somewhere, but I couldn’t orient myself. My nose filled with the blue smell of car exhaust and I could hear the steady rumble of turning wheels and the occasional screech as we jerked to a stop.
I felt myself, within my dark container, lifted again and carried and then I was being lowered down in slow jerks. I jostled as I hit bottom, limbs finally moving, though not of my own volition. I struggled to right myself, but again, could not move. That is when I began to hear the thock-thock noises that I recognized from years of archaeology, that I’d heard just that day at the dig. It was the sound of shovels biting into earth, of earth falling and hitting wood. They were burying me. They were burying me alive.
A piercing noise woke me and it took me a few moments of struggling against the binding sheets to realize it was my own scream, somehow disembodied by the transition from sleep to wakefulness. I shook hard as I pushed myself out of bed, heart pounding loud enough to echo in my inner ear. I stifled another scream. I couldn’t ignore the dreams anymore, or the visions of Irene. Not after this. What kind of person was I to wait so long? But, I couldn’t dwell on that. All the visions, the dreams, she’d been trying to communicate with me, to tell me she’d been buried alive. Every moment I waited now decreased my chances of rescuing her.
I tried to take a step and almost fell. I was so weak. Irene had talked about bad karma, and this must be what it felt like. I crawled on hands and knees out to the couch where Cliff lay, snoring loud enough to drown out my scream. I supported myself on the edge of the bed and shook him as best as I could.
“Cliff!” I shouted in his ear.
“One more minute,” he mumbled, starting to roll over.
“No, Cliff, this is important. You have to help me. I can’t do it alone.”
Cliff blinked and fumbled for the switch on the lamp next to his bed. He had to stifle a scream of his own when the light came on.
“Simon? You look…” He trailed off, mouth still open.
“It doesn’t matter.” I glanced down at my arms. The skin was the purple-brown of rotten meat and shriveled tight against the bone. My fingers were claws I could not uncurl. My vision lurched with sudden vertigo and I put my head down on the edge of the bed, heart pounding in my ears again. Then I forced myself up. I didn’t have time for this.
“It’s bad karma, or,” I searched for one of the other things Irene had told me about, “Or the Wiccans say that every deed you do returns to you tenfold. And I did a really bad thing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I buried Irene alive. I didn’t know. She’s down there, Cliff. I need your help to bring her back.”
Cliff rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “Simon, please. Listen to yourself. Don’t you think they would have noticed if she was alive when they embalmed her?”
“She wasn’t embalmed.”
“What?”
“I’ll explain in the car. We have to go to the graveyard now.”
Cliff climbed out of bed. “If we do this thing, you have to promise me to see a doctor. I know a specialist in New York City who’ll see you. I’ll call him tomorrow morning.”
“Anything you want.”
“I still have a couple shovels in the trunk of my car from the dig, and an emergency flashlight.”
“I ha
d her buried in the faculty lot. She wanted to be near the old oak.”
“I know. Let’s get going before I come to my senses.”
I leaned on him and together we hobbled out to the car.
As soon as we were seated, he turned to me and said, “If whatever is happening to you is psychosomatic, maybe seeing that she’s really gone will, I don’t know, help you let go. That’s why I’m doing this. You understand?”
I nodded. It didn’t matter why he helped, only that he did. It had taken me too long to understand as is, and it was a miracle she’d survived this long. If we waited any longer, she would really be dead.
“Now,” Cliff said, eyes back on the road, “Tell me why she wasn’t embalmed.”
“She didn’t want to be. The embalming fluids are poisonous and she didn’t want to be responsible for formaldehyde in the ground water killing the trees. She made me promise I wouldn’t let her parents embalm her.”
“But, her parents are Catholic, right? They wanted her embalmed.”
I nodded. “So, I told them she was and I asked the mortician to fix her up as best he could and I kept the coffin lid part way down so that her parents couldn’t get too good of a look. It’s what she wanted.”
I thought again of the bar of light from my dream. That must have been all she could see, looking out of the shaded coffin, unable to move, unable to cry for help. I shivered. I’m coming as fast I can, I thought. Forgive me; I’m coming as fast as I can.
Cliff pulled into the faculty parking lot with a nervous squeal of tires and popped the trunk from the dashboard control. The shovels were back there and an emergency flashlight. We were prepared. A torn fingernail of moon cast the spiky shadows of trees over the feeble light coming from the car windows. I leaned heavily on my shovel, afraid I would fall, and switched on the flashlight. For a moment I was blind and then the world returned, pierced through with yellowed light. Fighting vertigo, I hobbled forward as fast as I could.
There was no gate to mark where the cemetery began, no latch to lift or lock to pick. There was only a wicker archway and an uneven stone path with grass growing in the cracks. The wind blew cold against my face and the leaves in the trees rattled like half-hearted applause. The beam of my flashlight caught the first gravestones and made them glow white against the black fingers of moss. The shadow of the oak tree was my path up the hill, leading to the newest grave marker with her name like a fresh wound in its granite face.
“Here,” I said, and the word seemed to cut my lips.
“How deep,” said Cliff, his normally booming voice barely above a whisper.
“Not very. They couldn’t dig too deep. Because of the roots.”
I felt more than saw him nod and we began to dig. I heard again the thock-thock of shovel on dirt, but digging down this time. Uncovering, not burying. The handle was slick with sweat and something worse between my hands and I could hardly raise my arms, but I did, again and again.
It was Cliff whose shovel first struck wood with a hollow ring, and up out of the hole wafted the smell of still water and rancid sugar, rotting rose petals and black earth. I could see the wreath I’d laid atop the casket, withered flowers brown as dirt. My shovel fell from nerveless fingers and I grappled with the ground, tearing to pieces everything between myself and my wife. I was on my hands and knees, my belly; I tasted dirt and didn’t have the energy to spit. I heard a distant voice crying out again and again, “Irene,” and it seemed a long time before I realized it was mine.
Finally, my hands found the latch, and my frantic gestures brought Cliff over to help me lift. The lid rose slowly at first and then more quickly. I took a deep breath, trying to remember what little CPR I knew, and smelled decay. It was the sickly sweet smell of rotten meat, of mushrooms growing in fetid wood, of old wounds left to fester. I gagged and swung the flashlight around. For a moment I thought I saw the beam glance off of her dancing green eyes, but then the light shown in full and I could see. The light reflected off the green-glinting carapaces of beetles swarming over her burst stomach. I could hear Cliff retching behind me into the bushes. I could see eyeless things crawling through her flesh on many legs.
One of her hands lay on her breast, clutching the desiccated remains of roses swarming with ants. The other hand lay at her side curled into a claw. Her skin was so dark that her metacarpal bones seemed to glow where they pierced the back of her hand. She was dead. She had been dead for a long time. There was no way I could have saved her. My body shook with sobs, but though my eyes burned, no tears fell. She was dead. She had been dead for a long time. There was no way I could have saved her.
I raised my hands to my eyes to block the sight of her, and as they passed through the beam of the flashlight, I saw what they had become. The skin was dark and shriveled into a claw. I turned my hand to see the back and the metacarpal bones gaped out at me through broken skin. There was no blood, no pain, only sudden, dawning understanding. I looked down at Irene’s hand and saw a withered claw identical to my own, its bones emerging from blackened skin. I lay my hand next to hers. The same. She was dead. She had been dead for a long time. I could still save her. I just had to get away from here. I had to get home.
Cliff lifted me up off the ground. “It’s time to go home,” he said.
I nodded, hiding my hands from him behind my back.
“We have to close the coffin now and bury her again. You understand that she’s dead, right?”
I nodded again. “I just want to go home.”
Cliff closed the coffin and together we swept the dirt back over her. It made the sound from my dream. The sound of earth falling onto buried wood. Cliff gunned the engine and pulled out, turning the radio up as loud as it would go, as if he could drown out what we had just seen.
“You know I’ve seen some really awful things,” he screamed at me over the noise, “You were with me at the dig in Pennsylvania. But, that, I…” He stopped. Music filled the car, blotting out the silence of the night.
Then, he began again, “I don’t want to see you at work tomorrow. You’re going to sleep in and then you’re going to see the specialist in New York. The man owes me a big favor and I’m going to make him come out here. And we are never, ever going to talk about what we did tonight. I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my goddamn life as is. Okay?”
“Okay.”
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. But Cliff had been a good friend to me. I owed him more than that. “Thank you,” I said, barely audible above the screech of the bass guitar, “Thank you for everything. You’ve been a good friend to me.”
“The best. But, that doesn’t mean you don’t owe me big time. You’re going to have to do whatever I say for the rest of your life, got it?”
I nodded. “The rest of my life.”
The drum solo crashed around us and I leaned back into my seat. The rest of my life had ended a few days ago. I had dreamed two different ways things could have gone. First I’d seen myself at Irene’s funeral, just as I remembered it. But then I’d seen her at my funeral. Because she didn’t have to be the one who died. It could be either of us. Irene was dead now, but she needed to come back. I’d seen her wherever I looked because she had come to me after death. I was the only one who loved her enough to give her a life, my life. When I touched the mojo bag I’d seen her imprisoned because that is what it was made to do, prevent dead spirits from returning to take the life force of the living. If I held onto it, I’d get better. My skin would grow together and my color would return to normal. I’d live another thirty-or-so years as healthy as I ever was.
But I couldn’t do that. Irene was so young, with so much life ahead of her. She shouldn’t have been the one to die. I knew that all along. It should have been me. But, I could make it right. I love you, Irene, I thought. I’m coming as fast as I can.
Cliff dropped me off without a word, lost in his own dark thoughts. I waited until he’d pulled away, tail lights glowing like eyes in the distance, before I said goodbye. I unlocked the door and went inside. I turned on all the lights and went through the apartment. The dirty spoons in the bottom of the sink reflected her green eyes back at me. I caught a glimpse of her red hair in the shiny glass face of the wall clock in her bedroom. It was time.
I hadn’t opened Irene’s closet since the day she died, but the only full length mirror in the apartment was on the back of that door. I looked into it and she was waiting for me - beautiful, and young, and untouched by decay. Glancing at my own blackened, shriveled arms, I was glad I could not see my own reflection. “I love you,” I whispered to her, and her lips moved with mine. My fingers brushed against the mirror and passed through as if into still water, leaving ripples in their wake. I grasped Irene’s hands. They were cold, but slowly warmed in my arms. I drew her toward me and we kissed against the boundary of the glass and turned, so that I now stood on the other side.
“I love you,” she whispered to me, and my mouth followed hers. I watched her receding back until she passed out of sight and away into life. Cliff would be coming soon to drop off the personal effects from my office at St. Stephen’s and she needed to answer the door. Irene would cry and Cliff would comfort her.
That was the danger, Irene had said, of two water signs together. You could lose yourself in each other, lose track of who was who, who had lived and who had died. I could think of worse people to lose myself with. I closed my eyes and turned and walked out into the emptiness.
I had to get out of here. Out of our apartment. Off our street. Away from our town. I had to stay busy, keep my mind occupied, or I would go insane. I thought of seeing Irene in the mirror at the hospital and felt sick. I couldn’t let myself fall apart like that. I ran to the bathroom and turned the shower as hot as it would go. I closed my eyes and let the scalding water clean my skin and clear my mind. When I stepped out and stood dripping in my towel, I felt almost myself.
I fumbled behind the faucet for my glasses and put them on and the world settled into focus. The hot air from the shower had clouded my mirror, so I wiped a spot clean with a corner of my towel. My face floated in the misty void of the wet mirror and I watched myself frown at what I saw. I have always been prone to developing dark circles beneath my eyes when I don’t get enough sleep, and it’s only gotten worse with age. But, the image in my mirror looked as if it had not slept in weeks, if not months. The circles beneath my eyes had deepened to livid bruises and my skin looked sallow, almost greenish. The odd color of my skin made my veins stand out like a map of the New York subway system tattooed across my face.
What had that so-called doctor of medicine given me while I was passed out yesterday? It had to be more than cogentin - a muscle relaxant can’t make you look that awful when you wake up in the morning. I shook my head, feeling sick. Something had been done to me, and I didn’t know what. The only person who might know was Cliff. He’d taken me to the hospital, so he might have seen what Dr. Jiang did to me. At the very least, he could help me rule out whether not this had anything to do with my visit to the hospital.
I went in to the main room and moved the papers around on my desk until I uncovered my cell phone. I picked it up and got about halfway through punching in Cliff’s number before I glanced at the clock on the wall. Cliff would be at the dig with some of the students from one of the classes he was covering for me and he never answered his phone when he was working. It was a matter of personal pride to him. I would have to drive out to the dig if I wanted to talk to him, and that meant shaving and getting dressed.
I walked back to the bathroom and got out my razor and shaving cream. I soaped up and ran the razor over my jaw, only half paying attention to what I was doing. It wasn’t until I reached the tricky part under my chin and down my neck that I really had to look in the mirror. I peered intently at the white shaving cream covering my throat and felt more than saw a flicker of motion outside of the clear space on the mirror. A flash of red, misty as if seen through a veil of rain, and the suggestion of a face. I couldn’t stop myself from whirling around to see if someone was behind me. There was no one, and by the time I turned back the only face in the mirror was my own.
A trickle of blood dripped down my throat from where, in my distraction, I’d cut myself. Three purple drops ran down my neck and caught in the curve of my collar bone. I blinked twice, hard, and my own face looked back at me each time, sallow and bloodshot, but mine. Whatever I had seen before, it was gone. I pulled off a piece of toilet paper to blot my neck, but the cut had stopped bleeding. I traced its edge with one finger. It gaped open right above one of my veins and it looked deep, but the wound was dry. I shrugged at myself in the mirror. None of this made sense.
I rushed to my room to start dressing. I couldn’t stay here one minute longer. I would go to the dig. Cliff would be there with my students. I could ask him about what had happened at the hospital and look around and see if there had been any interesting finds. It would be good to get out, get fresh air. I wouldn’t be alone.
It was about a fifteen minute drive to the dig site over roads winding between cattle pastures and stands of trees just beginning to turn red. The air had the silvery, electric taste it gets before rain, but the clouds scudding across the sky were thin and empty of promise. I parked in an empty field and, shivering, pulled my overcoat out of the trunk and buttoned all the way up to my chin. It was a long walk uphill out to the dig site and I was already cold. The ground was dry, but when it rained, we would sink in mud up to our knees.
I could hear a thin barking in the distance, probably Indy. Indy - short for Indiana Jones, of course - is the exact size, shape, color, and texture of a mop. Despite this, I have seen him bend himself in half catching a Frisbee twice his size and drag it back to me. Cliff found Indy while digging in Pennsylvania. He claims he heard Indy barking and it led him to the site of his greatest find, which was buried just beneath the tip of the dog’s tail. Because of this he firmly believes that Indy has a sixth sense for finding artifacts and, as yet, I have been unable to disprove his theory.
As I came up over the edge of the hill, I heard Indy’s excited barking from behind the trees. I walked toward the sound. The small dog exploded out of the bushes, trailing a tangled leash, and made straight for my leg. His ears lay flat against his head and he growled once low in his throat. I stopped. Cliff moved fast at the heels of the dog, reaching for the leash just outside of his grasp.
Some part of my brain knew something was wrong, even as I bent over to scoop the furry dynamo into my arms and spare Cliff the trouble of the chase. I felt a sharp pain in my leg and yelped, falling over backward and scrambling away from the dog dashing for my head. Cliff lifted him out of the way, muttering curses and giving me time to pick myself up. My pants leg was torn through and underneath I could see a double row of tooth marks running around my ankle. After the initial pain of the bite, it hardly hurt, but I could see dark fluid pooling in the cuts.
I looked up. Indy cowered against Cliff’s chest, whining and shaking as he tried to bury his nose in Cliff’s arm pit.
“Oh my God! Are you okay? What the hell happened?” asked Cliff, transferring Indy to one arm so he could help me up with the other. He looked more upset than I was.
I ignored the arm, pulling my self up. “I think I’m okay, but I have no idea what happened, other than, you know, the obvious.”
“I’m so sorry, man. I can’t believe he bit you. You know how he is. If a robber came to the house, Indy would show him where I keep the good china in exchange for a belly rub.”
“You have good china?”
“Yeah. My mom gave it to me. Don’t you dare say anything.”
“My lips are sealed.”
“Good. Let’s get you bandaged up and then I’ll deal with Dr. Jones here.” He transferred his grip to keep the dog from leaping over his shoulder and onto the ground and I hobbled after him back to the dig site. Cliff had brought a folding chair out with him and I sank gratefully into it, stretching out my leg. As soon as Cliff had handed Indy off to the nearest responsible-looking student, he grabbed his first aid kit and brought it over.
“Here, let me take a look at the leg.”
“I can handle it.”
“Just because you took a first aid class as an undergrad does not make you a medical expert.”
“Apparently you taking a dog training class a few years ago doesn’t mean a heck of a lot either.”
Cliff stumbled back at my tone of voice. “Look, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened. If there’s any way I can make this up to you-“
He would have kept going if I hadn’t cut him off. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m just in some pain. Let me deal with the bandaging, okay? I’ll use plenty of Neosporin.”
I cuffed back the edge of my pants, wincing as threads brushed against the open wound.
“Hmm…it’s not bleeding much at all,” I muttered to myself, bent almost double to inspect my own ankle. “The wound must not be as deep as it looks, so I shouldn’t need stitches.”
Cliff glanced over skeptically.
“Just pass me the bottle of Neosporin and don’t you dare mother at me.”
He handed each of the things to me as he spoke and I started cleaning out the wound as best as I could. There was hardly any blood, just a trickle of some brownish-green fluid - probably some kind of plant sap I’d brushed against. Afterward, I smeared a thick layer of Neosporin over it and tied on the bandage. My ankle felt wobbly, but not hot the way an infection feels. If anything, my ankle felt cold, like the wind touched me there more than anywhere else. I settled myself more comfortably into the chair.
“You want me to help you back to your car? I can probably leave these guys alone for a bit without them misclassifying too many artifacts. It’s pretty much just sheep bones anyway.”
“Thanks, but I actually came here because I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“We could talk on the way. You look god-awful, man. Pardon my French.”
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Okay. The explanation for this one should be interesting.” He crouched down next to my chair, careful to keep his coat from dragging on the ground.
“What happened while I was unconscious at the hospital?”
“I don’t know. I sat in the waiting room. Why?”
“Well, I woke up the morning after I got back from there and I look, as you put it, god-awful. I wanted to know what Dr. Jiang gave me, besides cogentin that is, that might have side effects like this.”
“Simon, you want to know what happened while you were unconscious - here it is. Dr. Jiang saved your life. After you passed out, you started convulsing, sort of. Dr. Jiang said your muscles had contracted to a third of their normal length. They were tearing themselves apart. I’d never seen anything like it.”
“But-“
“No. It looked like you were going to die, Simon. Don’t blame the doctor, just quit the paranoid head-trip and take care of yourself. When was the last time you ate anything?”
“Um, I don’t know.”
“I have a ham and cheese sandwich in a bag somewhere under the chair. Eat it.”
“Isn’t that your lunch?”
“I’m trying to lose weight, anyway.”
Cliff ambled away, leaving me to grope in the darkness under the chair to find his sandwich bag. Try as I might, I couldn’t convince myself to do more than nibble at the corners. On the far side of the dig site, a stray beam of light found its way between the clouds to make a red-headed girl’s hair glow like a gold coin. I thought again of Irene as I first saw her, red-hair dark with rain, burying her hands in the warm mud, reaching into the ground as if she could pull out its secret heart. The girl crouched to look at something between two roots of a tree and her burning hair passed into shadow. The empty space beneath my ribs filled with lead. I coughed and turned away.
I had come here to escape these long moments of self-reflection and self-pity. I pulled myself to my feet and limped over to where some of the students worked. I could smell earth and desiccated leaves and the expectant scent of rain. I could hear the intermittent thock-thock of shovels hitting stones and the grunts of hard labor. I could see the remains of stone walls in which people had lived a century ago, now overgrown with wild grass and the puffball heads of dandelions. I would not look at the red-headed girl whose hair glowed like a gold coin. I would not cry.
“Professor Cleary?”
“Yes?”
I looked over my shoulder at a tall young man - one of the students in my 101 class. His name came to me a moment later, Johnny.
“I, uh, I wanted to say how sorry I am and everything. It’s terrible what happened.”
I nodded, unable to open my mouth enough to speak.
“Um, also, Mariella wanted me to tell you she found something weird.”
I took a deep breath. I couldn’t let my mind wander in front of my students. I couldn’t grieve. I had to be their teacher.
“Was it another sheep skull?” The ex-slaves who had lived on this land had continued working for their former owner after they were freed, raising and breeding sheep from New Zealand. Most of the finds that excited the students were the bones of sheep that they liked to tell each other, when they thought Cliff and I were out of ear shot, were really the remains of horribly mutated humans.
“No,” replied Johnny, “But it has bones in it. Little ones - like maybe from a bird.”
“Don’t move the artifact. I’ll help you catalog it and then we’ll move it together.”
Johnny led the way over to the girl with the red hair. The sun had passed behind a cloud again and her hair no longer glowed, but it was still the same color as Irene’s. Otherwise, Mariella looked nothing like her. I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking of the image I had seen in the hospital and again in my bathroom mirror. Whatever was happening to me, it had not escaped from the mirror into my life.
“Hey, Professor, look.” Mariella ceased hopping up and down with excitement and crouched to point at something half buried.
It had been red once, but had faded to a brown that matched the pit in which they had found it. The outlines were that of a bag made of rough cloth and cinched shut with a rotted-through strand of rope. The seam along one side had burst open, speckling the objects inside with dirt. I could see the protruding edges of small bones, the winking eyes of glass beads gone dull with age, and behind them, impressed in the cloth, the twisty shadow of John the Conqueror root. It smelled of the deep places in the earth and morning glories, and I could almost feel my spine straighten.
“So, what is it?” Mariella’s voice broke my reverie.
In an attempt to get them to take this seriously, I put on my most professorial voice. “It is what is generally known as a mojo bag, although in the francophone tradition it may be referred to as gris-gris, which has several variant spellings that-” I paused, realizing I had lost my students. “In the African-American tradition of hoodoo - evidently practiced by the family living in the house we are currently excavating - the mojo bag is a type of magic charm used to bring good luck. Typically they’re worn under the clothing, but, judging by the placement of this piece, I’d say this one was purposefully buried in front of the house as a ward against evil influences.”
“Weird.” Johnny this time.
“Not at all, really. Most cultures create some sort of talisman to ward off evil. I’m sure you can think of other examples if you try.”
Johnny looked away, more thoroughly reprimanded than I had intended. I crouched down and reached into my coat pocket, pulling out a small brush. I reached into the pit Mariella and Johnny had dug and began to wipe flecks of dirt off the fabric. I felt the coarse edge of the cloth brush the underside of my fingers as I clumsily shifted weight. The sore muscles I’d had since the morning I collapsed to the floor and had to be taken to the hospital unclenched themselves. Some tight thing in my chest unclenched and my lungs expanded. Joint aches I hadn’t even known I had faded. The dull, heavy feeling I’d been carrying in my stomach passed, and I was suddenly ravenously hungry.
The backs of my eyelids were like a movie screen on which I could see a woman like and unlike my Irene. Her skin was white as sickness and her hair floated around her head in a fiery halo. Her eyes were green as a cat’s. But the freckles on her cheekbones and the curve of her neck were familiar. I had seen that upturned nose, those curving lips, that pointed chin, every morning I had woken up next to my wife. She pressed herself against the wrong side of a mirror reflecting an empty room. I could see her dress, the white one with the pink rosettes on the collar, the one that Irene was buried in. Her long-nailed hands clawed the glass, seeking purchase. She snarled, lips drawing back to reveal rows of sharp, white teeth and the pointed red tongue that ran over them. Her eyes, green as glacial ice and just as cold, found mine and I stumbled back, pulling my hand away from the mojo bag.
The image vanished and my chest tightened and the aches in my muscles and joints returned with staggering intensity. I fell backward into a sitting position, sucking in air through clenched teeth. I wasn’t hungry anymore.
“You okay, Professor?” Mariella’s face close to mine, mouth contorted with worry.
I couldn’t help myself after what I’d just seen; I recoiled. I scooted backward, trying to put distance between myself and the red-haired girl. I had to calm myself. I couldn’t let my students see me like this. They deserved better. I tried to compose my face into calmer lines, but they only looked at me with more worry.
“Look, why don’t you go talk to Cliff - Professor Radcliff that is - and get him to help you. I need to…” My sentence trailed off lamely. I didn’t know what I needed to do other than go someplace else.
I pushed myself awkwardly to my feet and walked off before they could ask me more questions. I had no answers. None at all. Looking back over my shoulder when I reached the crest of the hill, I could see the black silhouettes of Johnny and Mariella gesturing animatedly in front of the larger darkness that was Cliff. My mind felt too heavy to wonder what they said.
I couldn’t go home and I couldn’t stay here. My mind was playing tricks on me. Sunlight glancing off a girl’s hair had made me feel so full and so hollow, like all I had inside me was a scream shaped like a name. I bit my lips to keep them closed so I wouldn’t scream aloud - Irene. I walked, vision blurring with tears I refused to shed, back to the car. I sat in the front seat with my hand hovering, ready to move from park to drive, but my mind blank. Tears slid soundlessly down my eyelashes and ran over the lenses of my glasses, streaking them with the patterns of rain falling on windows. I felt too empty to be sad.
I took off my glasses and cleaned the lenses. I ran the sleeves of my coat roughly over my eyes. I couldn’t just sit here in a parked car half a mile from the dig site and think about Irene trapped behind glass. I had to go somewhere. I switched the car into drive. I would go to the pool at the St. Stephen’s gym. I’ve always been able to think more clearly underwater, as if the brief escape from gravity and solid surfaces loosed some bonds on my brain. When I told Irene about this, she’d said it made sense.
“Why?” I asked.
“You’re a Scorpio, which, even though it’s supposed to be a scorpion, is a water sign. So, it makes sense you’d love swimming.”
“And you’re a Pisces, which is the fish one, right?” She nodded. “So, unless I miss my guess, you are also a water sign.”
She nodded again, smiling. “I’ll make an astrologer out of you yet.”
“So, what does that mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“Us both being water signs. Your column - it’s all about looking at people’s zodiac signs and seeing if their compatible and whatnot. Well, what about us. Are we compatible?”
I snuggled down next to her, putting the tip of my nose against the soft skin of her neck.
“It’s not that easy. I mean, two water signs, it can go either way.” She pulled away slightly, tapping her index finger against her front two teeth as she thought. “On one hand, it means we’ll always understand each other. We’ll have a bond that can’t be broken. On the other hand, sometimes, two water signs together can get dangerous. They can lose themselves in each other and never find their way out.” She pulled closer to me, smiling slightly. “But, of course you don’t believe in any of this.”
I shook my head. “Not really, but I can think of worse people to lose myself with.”
“Aren’t you a charmer.”
“I try.”
I ran my hand over my face, pushing away the memory, and pulled into the faculty parking lot. I got out of the car and the slam of the door as I closed it echoed behind me for a moment as I walked up to the gym. The sun hung behind the trees edging the hill behind the gym so that its light seemed to compress the view before me into two dimensions. It seemed to me for a moment like a child’s charcoal drawing - the sort of thing that might have “my house” written in clumsy letters above it in the paper-white sky. The front door squeaked as I opened it. I nodded to the student at the front desk, someone I’d had in class a year or two ago, who didn’t need to check my ID to know I was a professor here and entitled to use the facilities. Even from here the chlorine smell was strong enough to burn my nostrils.
I looked down over the swimming pool from the viewing windows before heading down to the locker room to change. From above the pool was a perfect turquoise rectangle. Of course, if you scooped the water into your hand, it would be clear, not turquoise. The color came from the tiles at the bottom of the pool, tiles at the bottom of every pool designed to convince us that water was meant to be the color of a semi-precious stone. Still, there was something right about the turquoise color and the astringent smell of chlorine in my nose.
I walked down to the side of the pool, swim trunks bunching around my legs. I left my glasses on an abandoned pool chair with a duct tape red cross on the back, the college’s sop to life guard duty, and plunged into the pool. I sunk beneath the water, eyes open, and the scream that I’d held so long trapped in my lungs left me in a cloud of air bubbles rising silently to the surface.
The first time I brought Irene here, I remember, she wore a green and yellow paisley bikini with a tie in the back that always looked like it was about to come untied and gigantic wraparound shades. She said sunglasses were an integral part of the swimming experience and couldn’t be neglected even if the pool was indoors. I jumped in right away, but she’d sat on the side, kicking her feet to send little waves to splash me in the face when I surfaced.
I caught her feet and slid my hands up along her legs to her thighs, pulling her into the water with me. I kept one hand on the wall, while she wrapped arms and legs around me, her mouth on mine so hard I could barely breathe. Her hand teasing at the waistband of my swim trunks. My hand untying the knot in her bikini top. The top drifted away, carried by one of the wavelets made by her kicking feet, and her breast floated free on top of the water, dappled with freckles except for two perfect circles of pure white skin around the raised red mound of each nipple. The bright red and green of her tattoo glowed underwater like some rare tropical fish. My swimsuit joined hers, lost in the water, and we sunk together to the bottom of the pool. Her hands tangled in my hair. My hands traced the curve between her legs. I moved inside her, so warm in the surrounding cold water. She gasped bubbles of air in a column to the surface, eyes closed, skin blue in the aquarium light, like a mermaid with her hair a nimbus of fire around her head.
Tightness in my chest pulled me from my reverie. I gasped, sucking in water instead of air. My nose hovered centimeters above the tile floor of the pool. Far above, the florescent lights filtered down to me through the water, deep blue and wavering as ghosts. I swam to the surface, spitting water and choking on air. That wasn’t how it had happened. We’d come to the pool together and I’d dragged her in with me. We were about to kiss when a couple of students from my freshman seminar showed up with an inflatable volleyball and started stringing up a net across the pool. We’d climbed out of the water, suddenly shy, me walking a step behind her to hide the awkward bulge of my swim trunks.
I paddled to the side of the pool and pulled myself out and knelt a moment, dripping wet, staring at my reflection. Without my glasses, my vision blurred and what looked back at me seemed almost doubled. I shook my head and climbed unsteadily to my feet. It had seemed so real, more real, almost, than what had really happened. I picked up my glasses off the lifeguard’s empty chair and settled them on my nose, heedless of the wet. I went back to the side of the pool and gazed in. There was my reflection. Brown hair beginning to gray at the temples, overlong nose, the beginnings of a paunch around my middle. The blue of the water made my image seem darker than it should be, almost purple.
The water seemed to cloud for a second, or perhaps I blinked, and she was next to me. Her white arms around me, her naked body pressed against my side, her mouth so close to my neck that I could almost feel her hot breath, but I felt nothing. She was there in the water with my reflection. Her freckled thighs. Her flaming hair. Her green cat’s eyes. Her sharp, red mouth, brushing my reflection’s throat. But, I felt nothing. I reached into the water as if I could lift her out, but was left staring at my empty reflection.
I dipped my hand once more into the water. Cold. I left my hand there until it began to feel numb. My mind was playing tricks on me again. I’d run out of our apartment after seeing her, run all the way to the dig, and then I’d run from there to the pool. But she had followed me everywhere. There was no place in my life that I had not brought her, which was not thick with the memories of her. But I didn’t want to escape her, did I? Whatever was happening in my mind, it was probably the last chance I had to see my wife. I smiled slightly and grabbed a towel out of the bin and headed for the changing room. This was a gift. I would go home.
I toweled dry, staring into the warped green metal of a row of lockers. My face stared back. I blinked. Even in the dull reflection of the dented metal, I could tell something was wrong. Something was wrong with my face. I squinted and peered closer, but couldn’t get the image to resolve beyond a sense of something-is-not-right. I ran into the men’s bathroom and almost did not recognize myself in the mirror that spanned the back wall behind the sinks. The air was heavy and blurred the image with condensation. I went up close to the mirror, almost afraid to clear a space to look in.
Dark lines crisscrossed my brow and traced the edges of my eye sockets. They outlined my cheekbones and the folds of my jaw and I could see them disappearing into the parts of my throat hidden by condensation on the glass. I wiped off more of the mirror with my towel. Thick bands of reddish-brown ran down from my cheeks, through my throat, and met beneath my solar plexus at my heart. I knew what this meant. I shivered and every hair on my body stood at attention.
I had had blood poisoning once, when I’d fallen and cut open my elbow hiking to a dig in China. I hadn’t been able to get water I trusted to clean my wound, so I’d let it go. I ended up in the hospital three weeks later, a single black vein snaking its way up my arm, over my shoulder, and down almost to my heart. I crouched down on the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees. When I’d gotten back to Beijing, the doctor had told me that, if I’d waited any longer, the infection would have reached my heart. And, he said, if the infection reaches your heart, you die. It was as simple as that.
Could it be the dog bite? The stitches in my head? No, infection like this takes time - a slow dark line growing by millimeters along a single vein. This was different. Every vein and artery rusted dark. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Air rushed in and out too fast to catch in my lungs, and I leaned into the sink to support myself. My hand caught on the handle and cold water spurted onto my chest. I didn’t look down. My hands were shaking too much to turn the water back off.
I stared into the mirror, unable to break eye contact with myself, as the brown of my veins shifted to a sick green, like something left out in the sun to rot. My chest burned from lack of air. The green lines spread over my body like ink, tracing the large veins and arteries, spreading into the fine capillaries. My body doubled, forcibly wrenching my eyes from the mirror, as I vomited yellowish fluid into the white sink. I watched it spiral down the drain with the water, wiping my mouth on the corner of a towel. The room smelled astringent, like unripe fruit and rotting gums. I couldn’t stay here. I had to go home.
I pulled my shirt on without bothering with half the buttons. I left the belt off my pants. Somehow I made it to the car and I have no idea how I got home. I don’t remember anything about the drive home except a smell - still water and rotting rose petals, rancid sugar and black earth. I staggered into our apartment and collapsed on the couch, unable to make it as far as the bedroom. The world swam against my half-closed lids a moment and then I was gone.
I was back in the dark place with a single band of light across my vision. I strained my eyes to see two figures bathed in light - a tall man in a priest’s black clothes and white collar, and a slight woman with red-hair in a black dress. I strained toward her, but as before I could not move even to blink. The priest put his hand on the woman’s shoulder, but she shrugged it off and turned toward me. She kneeled down until her face filled my vision - Irene. Her eyes were swollen with tears, turning her deep green eyes almost gray, but she spared me the smallest of smiles. “I love you,” her lips said without sound, “I love you.” I struggled against unbending muscle and rigid tendons to raise my hand even a fraction of an inch to caress her face, but could do nothing. Irene raised her hand and blotted out my light.
I lay unmoving in total darkness. I could feel the narrow walls that confined me against my shoulders and knew I should be afraid, but I was not. All I could think about was Irene’s face, tears locked up in her eyes unable to escape. I don’t know how long I waited in the dark before I felt motion, but just as I was beginning to try to discern the direction of my travel, a banging noise began. The banging reverberated, growing louder and louder, accompanied by a high and repetitive two-note ring. Some distant part of me, a phantom limb of my conscious mind, knew what this was and what it meant and pulled me up into the waking world.
I pulled myself to a see seated position. Cliff was using his patented method of getting into people’s homes at all hours of the night, banging on the door with one hand while repeatedly hitting the doorbell with the other. If I didn’t get up soon, he’d add shouting my name repeatedly to the mix.
“Simon! Simon, I know you’re in here. Answer the goddamn door!”
My next door neighbors would try to get me evicted if this went on too much longer. I stood up and shuffled to the door and pulled it open.
“What?”
“I wanted to say I was really sorry about Indy biting-“ He paused mid-thought and stared at me, mouth ajar. “Good God, man, you look awful. What the hell happened to you?”
I shrugged.
“It looks like blood poisoning. You should really go to the hospital.”
“They’ll just tell me what I already know.”
“Which is…?” He shouldered past me into the apartment and pulled the door closed behind both of us.
“That it’s psychosomatic.”
“How the hell could it all be in your head? I can see that you look like shit.”
“I-“ I paused, unsure how, or if, to go on. “It’s complicated.” I sat down on the couch and he pulled up a kitchen chair to face me. “I’ve been seeing Irene. At the pool, the dig, the hospital, even in the bathroom mirror. She looks alive. I saw her buried, I know-but, she looks, she looks…She was so young, Cliff. People shouldn’t die that young. I’m old, I mean, older, and-”
“That’s survivor’s guilt, Simon,” Cliff interrupted, “If you could have saved her, you would have. You were always after her to wear a seatbelt…”
“That’s what I mean. Worrying about wearing a seatbelt, it’s worrying about death. You have to be a certain age to think about death like that, like it’s personal. It would be obscene for her to have to think like that. About her own death.”
“Simon - and I never thought I would say this - but, you have to put the anthropology lesson away. Intellectualizing death, it doesn’t make it easier. You just have to live through it. It’s what Irene would want.”
“How do you know what my wife would want?”
“Don’t be stupid, Simon. She loved you; of course she’d want you to be happy.”
I laughed, because it was better than crying.
“Dwelling on this isn’t good for you. Let’s talk about something else.”
Silence stretched between us.
Finally, Cliff spoke, “History’s Mysteries is having a special on the holy grail. I won’t even make fun of you for getting all mad when they bring in British historians, when we know five people better in the U.S.”
I smiled. Cliff was my best friend for a reason. With an effort of will, I forced everything that had happened from my head. I needed a moment of normal life, even if it was just a moment. “They just have Brits on because it sounds more ‘authentic.’ All the really important grail research has been happening here ever since Don Foreman moved to Boston. Everyone knows that.”
He clicked the TV on. “That’s what I mean. There’s nothing better for grief than getting pissed off about something stupid.” He paused. “I’m getting a beer.”
“Get me one too.”
“Looking like that? Hell, no.”
“It’s my beer!”
“And you aren’t drinking any of it.” He got up and walked into the kitchen and I heard the whooshing sound of the fridge opening.
I closed my eyes. I could be normal for Cliff. This is what I’d been trying to do all day, after all, get my mind off of it. Maybe this would help. If it was psychosomatic, then Cliff was right, dwelling on it would only make it worse. I opened my eyes.
Carefully keeping my voice light, I shouted over my shoulder, “Get back here quickly or you’ll miss the panning-across-totally-irrelevant-friezes part of the show.”
“As long as I don’t miss the bearded re-enactors in period inappropriate colorful cloaks, I’ll be fine,” he said, plopping down on the couch and putting his feet up on the displaced kitchen chair.
I dozed off and on, catching about half the episode and trying not to drool too obviously on my collar. My eyes were only half open when I heard the music of the credits.
“Hey, Simon,” Cliff said, clapping me on the back, “I’m going to have to crash here tonight. I am way too drunk to drive home.”
I glanced over at the beer bottle on the table. He’d barely touched it. He glanced surreptitiously at me with suddenly clear eyes and I understood. He was worried about me. He knew if he asked to stay over to make sure I was okay, I’d send him packing. So, by pretending to be drunk, he gave himself an ironclad excuse to spend the night and keep an eye on me. I thought for a moment of calling him on it, but was too tired for the resulting argument.
“Yeah, that brand is a bit stronger than most. The fold-out bed in the couch has sheets on it already and there should be an old comforter in the linen closet. I can’t promise it won’t be pink or have flowers on it, though.”
“That’s fine. I’ll take care of it. You get to bed.”
He didn’t have to say it twice. I barely managed to change from street clothes to pajamas before crawling under the covers and falling asleep. My dream began in darkness where the other dream had left me. I was being carried somewhere, but I couldn’t orient myself. My nose filled with the blue smell of car exhaust and I could hear the steady rumble of turning wheels and the occasional screech as we jerked to a stop.
I felt myself, within my dark container, lifted again and carried and then I was being lowered down in slow jerks. I jostled as I hit bottom, limbs finally moving, though not of my own volition. I struggled to right myself, but again, could not move. That is when I began to hear the thock-thock noises that I recognized from years of archaeology, that I’d heard just that day at the dig. It was the sound of shovels biting into earth, of earth falling and hitting wood. They were burying me. They were burying me alive.
A piercing noise woke me and it took me a few moments of struggling against the binding sheets to realize it was my own scream, somehow disembodied by the transition from sleep to wakefulness. I shook hard as I pushed myself out of bed, heart pounding loud enough to echo in my inner ear. I stifled another scream. I couldn’t ignore the dreams anymore, or the visions of Irene. Not after this. What kind of person was I to wait so long? But, I couldn’t dwell on that. All the visions, the dreams, she’d been trying to communicate with me, to tell me she’d been buried alive. Every moment I waited now decreased my chances of rescuing her.
I tried to take a step and almost fell. I was so weak. Irene had talked about bad karma, and this must be what it felt like. I crawled on hands and knees out to the couch where Cliff lay, snoring loud enough to drown out my scream. I supported myself on the edge of the bed and shook him as best as I could.
“Cliff!” I shouted in his ear.
“One more minute,” he mumbled, starting to roll over.
“No, Cliff, this is important. You have to help me. I can’t do it alone.”
Cliff blinked and fumbled for the switch on the lamp next to his bed. He had to stifle a scream of his own when the light came on.
“Simon? You look…” He trailed off, mouth still open.
“It doesn’t matter.” I glanced down at my arms. The skin was the purple-brown of rotten meat and shriveled tight against the bone. My fingers were claws I could not uncurl. My vision lurched with sudden vertigo and I put my head down on the edge of the bed, heart pounding in my ears again. Then I forced myself up. I didn’t have time for this.
“It’s bad karma, or,” I searched for one of the other things Irene had told me about, “Or the Wiccans say that every deed you do returns to you tenfold. And I did a really bad thing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I buried Irene alive. I didn’t know. She’s down there, Cliff. I need your help to bring her back.”
Cliff rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “Simon, please. Listen to yourself. Don’t you think they would have noticed if she was alive when they embalmed her?”
“She wasn’t embalmed.”
“What?”
“I’ll explain in the car. We have to go to the graveyard now.”
Cliff climbed out of bed. “If we do this thing, you have to promise me to see a doctor. I know a specialist in New York City who’ll see you. I’ll call him tomorrow morning.”
“Anything you want.”
“I still have a couple shovels in the trunk of my car from the dig, and an emergency flashlight.”
“I ha
d her buried in the faculty lot. She wanted to be near the old oak.”
“I know. Let’s get going before I come to my senses.”
I leaned on him and together we hobbled out to the car.
As soon as we were seated, he turned to me and said, “If whatever is happening to you is psychosomatic, maybe seeing that she’s really gone will, I don’t know, help you let go. That’s why I’m doing this. You understand?”
I nodded. It didn’t matter why he helped, only that he did. It had taken me too long to understand as is, and it was a miracle she’d survived this long. If we waited any longer, she would really be dead.
“Now,” Cliff said, eyes back on the road, “Tell me why she wasn’t embalmed.”
“She didn’t want to be. The embalming fluids are poisonous and she didn’t want to be responsible for formaldehyde in the ground water killing the trees. She made me promise I wouldn’t let her parents embalm her.”
“But, her parents are Catholic, right? They wanted her embalmed.”
I nodded. “So, I told them she was and I asked the mortician to fix her up as best he could and I kept the coffin lid part way down so that her parents couldn’t get too good of a look. It’s what she wanted.”
I thought again of the bar of light from my dream. That must have been all she could see, looking out of the shaded coffin, unable to move, unable to cry for help. I shivered. I’m coming as fast I can, I thought. Forgive me; I’m coming as fast as I can.
Cliff pulled into the faculty parking lot with a nervous squeal of tires and popped the trunk from the dashboard control. The shovels were back there and an emergency flashlight. We were prepared. A torn fingernail of moon cast the spiky shadows of trees over the feeble light coming from the car windows. I leaned heavily on my shovel, afraid I would fall, and switched on the flashlight. For a moment I was blind and then the world returned, pierced through with yellowed light. Fighting vertigo, I hobbled forward as fast as I could.
There was no gate to mark where the cemetery began, no latch to lift or lock to pick. There was only a wicker archway and an uneven stone path with grass growing in the cracks. The wind blew cold against my face and the leaves in the trees rattled like half-hearted applause. The beam of my flashlight caught the first gravestones and made them glow white against the black fingers of moss. The shadow of the oak tree was my path up the hill, leading to the newest grave marker with her name like a fresh wound in its granite face.
“Here,” I said, and the word seemed to cut my lips.
“How deep,” said Cliff, his normally booming voice barely above a whisper.
“Not very. They couldn’t dig too deep. Because of the roots.”
I felt more than saw him nod and we began to dig. I heard again the thock-thock of shovel on dirt, but digging down this time. Uncovering, not burying. The handle was slick with sweat and something worse between my hands and I could hardly raise my arms, but I did, again and again.
It was Cliff whose shovel first struck wood with a hollow ring, and up out of the hole wafted the smell of still water and rancid sugar, rotting rose petals and black earth. I could see the wreath I’d laid atop the casket, withered flowers brown as dirt. My shovel fell from nerveless fingers and I grappled with the ground, tearing to pieces everything between myself and my wife. I was on my hands and knees, my belly; I tasted dirt and didn’t have the energy to spit. I heard a distant voice crying out again and again, “Irene,” and it seemed a long time before I realized it was mine.
Finally, my hands found the latch, and my frantic gestures brought Cliff over to help me lift. The lid rose slowly at first and then more quickly. I took a deep breath, trying to remember what little CPR I knew, and smelled decay. It was the sickly sweet smell of rotten meat, of mushrooms growing in fetid wood, of old wounds left to fester. I gagged and swung the flashlight around. For a moment I thought I saw the beam glance off of her dancing green eyes, but then the light shown in full and I could see. The light reflected off the green-glinting carapaces of beetles swarming over her burst stomach. I could hear Cliff retching behind me into the bushes. I could see eyeless things crawling through her flesh on many legs.
One of her hands lay on her breast, clutching the desiccated remains of roses swarming with ants. The other hand lay at her side curled into a claw. Her skin was so dark that her metacarpal bones seemed to glow where they pierced the back of her hand. She was dead. She had been dead for a long time. There was no way I could have saved her. My body shook with sobs, but though my eyes burned, no tears fell. She was dead. She had been dead for a long time. There was no way I could have saved her.
I raised my hands to my eyes to block the sight of her, and as they passed through the beam of the flashlight, I saw what they had become. The skin was dark and shriveled into a claw. I turned my hand to see the back and the metacarpal bones gaped out at me through broken skin. There was no blood, no pain, only sudden, dawning understanding. I looked down at Irene’s hand and saw a withered claw identical to my own, its bones emerging from blackened skin. I lay my hand next to hers. The same. She was dead. She had been dead for a long time. I could still save her. I just had to get away from here. I had to get home.
Cliff lifted me up off the ground. “It’s time to go home,” he said.
I nodded, hiding my hands from him behind my back.
“We have to close the coffin now and bury her again. You understand that she’s dead, right?”
I nodded again. “I just want to go home.”
Cliff closed the coffin and together we swept the dirt back over her. It made the sound from my dream. The sound of earth falling onto buried wood. Cliff gunned the engine and pulled out, turning the radio up as loud as it would go, as if he could drown out what we had just seen.
“You know I’ve seen some really awful things,” he screamed at me over the noise, “You were with me at the dig in Pennsylvania. But, that, I…” He stopped. Music filled the car, blotting out the silence of the night.
Then, he began again, “I don’t want to see you at work tomorrow. You’re going to sleep in and then you’re going to see the specialist in New York. The man owes me a big favor and I’m going to make him come out here. And we are never, ever going to talk about what we did tonight. I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my goddamn life as is. Okay?”
“Okay.”
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. But Cliff had been a good friend to me. I owed him more than that. “Thank you,” I said, barely audible above the screech of the bass guitar, “Thank you for everything. You’ve been a good friend to me.”
“The best. But, that doesn’t mean you don’t owe me big time. You’re going to have to do whatever I say for the rest of your life, got it?”
I nodded. “The rest of my life.”
The drum solo crashed around us and I leaned back into my seat. The rest of my life had ended a few days ago. I had dreamed two different ways things could have gone. First I’d seen myself at Irene’s funeral, just as I remembered it. But then I’d seen her at my funeral. Because she didn’t have to be the one who died. It could be either of us. Irene was dead now, but she needed to come back. I’d seen her wherever I looked because she had come to me after death. I was the only one who loved her enough to give her a life, my life. When I touched the mojo bag I’d seen her imprisoned because that is what it was made to do, prevent dead spirits from returning to take the life force of the living. If I held onto it, I’d get better. My skin would grow together and my color would return to normal. I’d live another thirty-or-so years as healthy as I ever was.
But I couldn’t do that. Irene was so young, with so much life ahead of her. She shouldn’t have been the one to die. I knew that all along. It should have been me. But, I could make it right. I love you, Irene, I thought. I’m coming as fast as I can.
Cliff dropped me off without a word, lost in his own dark thoughts. I waited until he’d pulled away, tail lights glowing like eyes in the distance, before I said goodbye. I unlocked the door and went inside. I turned on all the lights and went through the apartment. The dirty spoons in the bottom of the sink reflected her green eyes back at me. I caught a glimpse of her red hair in the shiny glass face of the wall clock in her bedroom. It was time.
I hadn’t opened Irene’s closet since the day she died, but the only full length mirror in the apartment was on the back of that door. I looked into it and she was waiting for me - beautiful, and young, and untouched by decay. Glancing at my own blackened, shriveled arms, I was glad I could not see my own reflection. “I love you,” I whispered to her, and her lips moved with mine. My fingers brushed against the mirror and passed through as if into still water, leaving ripples in their wake. I grasped Irene’s hands. They were cold, but slowly warmed in my arms. I drew her toward me and we kissed against the boundary of the glass and turned, so that I now stood on the other side.
“I love you,” she whispered to me, and my mouth followed hers. I watched her receding back until she passed out of sight and away into life. Cliff would be coming soon to drop off the personal effects from my office at St. Stephen’s and she needed to answer the door. Irene would cry and Cliff would comfort her.
That was the danger, Irene had said, of two water signs together. You could lose yourself in each other, lose track of who was who, who had lived and who had died. I could think of worse people to lose myself with. I closed my eyes and turned and walked out into the emptiness.