“I don’t know. Yes. Perhaps I will,” you say. “But I must go now. I have some place ahead of me to find. I will come.”
“Good,” he says, as you walk off, leaving him in shadow. “Good, good, good.”
Up the hill now, as quick as you can. Thank God there is a coolness upon the Earth tonight. If it was a hot night it would be terrible to be above the ground in your condition.
You gasp happily. There, in all its rococo magnificence, is the house where Grandma sheltered her boarders. Where you as a child sat on the porch Fourth of July, watching sky rockets climb in fiery froth, the pinwheels cursing, sputtering sparks, the fire-crackers beating at your ears from the metal cannon of Uncle Bion who loved noise and bought fifty dollars worth of crackers just to explode them with his hand-rolled cigarette.
Now, standing, trembling with this emotion of recapturence, you know why the dead walk. To see again things like this. Here, on nights when dew invaded the grass, you crushed the wet petals and grass-blades and leaves as your boy bodies wrestled, and you knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!
Inside that grand old tall house the incredible Saturday nights took place, the Boston-baked beans in hordes saturated with thick juices, panoplied with platforms of bacon. Oh, yes, all of that. And the huge black piano that cried out at you when you performed musical dentistry upon its teeth …
And here, here, man, remember? This is Kim’s house. That yellow light, around the back, that’s her room. Do you realize that she might be in it now, painting her pictures or reading her books? In one moment, glance over that house, the porch, the swing before the door where you sat on August evenings. Think of it. Kim, your wife. In a moment you will see her again!
You bang the gate wide and hurry up the walk. You think to call, but instead slip quietly around the side. Her mother and father would go crazy if they saw you. Bad enough, the shock to Kim.
Here is her room. Glowing and square and soft and empty. Feed upon it. Is it not good to see again?
Your breath forms upon the window a symbol of your anxiety; the cold glass films with fog and blurs the exact and wonderful details of her existence there.
As the fog vanishes the form of her room emerges. The pink spread upon the low soft bed, the cherry-wood flooring, brilliantly waxed; throw-rugs like bright heavily furred dogs slumbering acenter it. The mirror. The small cosmetic table, where her sorcery is enacted in an easy pantomime. You wait.
She comes into the room.
Her hair is a lamp burning, bound behind her ears by her moving, she looks tired, her eyes are half-lidded, but even in this uncertain light, blue. Her dress is short and firm to her figure.
Breathlessly, you listen against the cold shell of glass, and as from deep under a sea you hear a song. She sings so softly it is already an echo before it leaves her mouth. You wonder what she thinks as she sings and combs out her hair at the mirror.
The cold brine of you stirs and beats. Certainly she must hear your heart’s cold thunder!
Thoughtless, you tap upon the window.
She goes on stroking her hair gently, thinking that you are only the autumn wind outside the glass.
You tap again, anxiously, a bit afraid.
This time she sets down the comb and brush and rises to investigate, calm and certain.
At first she sees nothing. You are shadowed. Her eyes, as she walks toward the window, are focused on the gleaming squares of glass. Then, she looks through. She sees a dim figure beyond the light. She still does not recognize.
“Kim!” You cannot help yourself. “It is I! I am here!”
Your eager face pushes to the light, as a submerged body must surge upon some black tide, suddenly floating, triumphant, with shimmering dark eyes!
The color drops from her cheeks. Her hands open to release sanity which flies away on strange wings. Her hands clasp again, to recapture some last sane thought. She does not scream. Only her eyes are wide as windows seen on a white house amidst a terrific lightning-shaft in a sudden summer squall, shadeless, empty and silvered with that terrific bolt of power!
“Kim!” you cry. “It is I!”
She says your name. She forms it with a numb mouth. Neither of you can hear it. She wants to run, but instead, at your insistence, she pulls up the window and, sobbing, you climb upward into the light. You slam the window and stand swaying there, only to find her far across the room, crucified by fear against the wall.
You sob raggedly. Your hands rise clean toward her in a gesture of old hunger and want. “Oh, Kim, it’s been so long—”
TIME IS NON-EXISTENT. For five full minutes you remember nothing. You come out of it. You find yourself upon the soft rim of bed, staring at the floor.
In your ears is her crying.
She sits before the mirror, her shoulders moving like wings trying to fly with some agony as she makes the sounds.
“I know I am dead. I know I am. But what can I try to do to this cold? I want to be near your warmness, like at a fire in a long cold forest, Kim …”
“Six months,” she breathes, not believing it. “You’ve been gone that long. I saw the lid close over your face. I saw the earth fall on the lid like a kind of sounding of drums. I cried. I cried until only a vacuum remained. You can’t be here now—”
“I am here!”
“What can we do?” she wonders, holding her body with her hands.
“I don’t know. Now that I’ve seen you, I don’t want to walk back and get into that box. It’s a horrible wooden chrysalis, Kim, I don’t want its kind of metamorphosis—”
“Why, why, why did you come?”
“I was lost in the dark, Kim, and I dreamed a deep earth dream of you. Like a seventeen-year locust I writhed in my dream. I had to find my way back, somehow.”
“But you can’t stay.”
“Until daybreak.”
“Paul, don’t take of my blood. I want to live.”
“You’re wrong, Kim. I’m not that kind. I’m only myself.”
“You’re different.”
“I’m the same. I still love you.”
“You’re jealous of me.”
“No, I’m not, Kim. I’m not jealous.”
“We’re enemies now, Paul. We can’t love any more. I’m the quick, you’re the dead. We’re opposed by our very natures. We’re natural enemies. I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.”
“But I love YOU, Kim!”
“You love my life and what life means, don’t you see?”
“I don’t see! What are we like, the two of us sitting here, talking philosophically, scientifically, at a time when we both should be laughing and glad to see one another.”
“Not with jealousy and fear between us like a net. I loved you, Paul. I loved the things we did together. The processes, the dynamics of our relationship. The things you said, the thoughts you thought. Those things, I still love. But, but—”
“I still think those thoughts and think them over and over, Kim!”
“But we are apart.”
“Don’t be merciless, Kim. Have pity!”
Her face softens. She builds a cage around her face with convulsive fingers. Words escape the cage:
“Is pity love? Is it, Paul?”
There is a bitter tiredness in her breathing.
You stand upright. “I’ll go crazy if this goes on!”
Wearily, her voice replies, “Can dead people go insane?”
You go to her, quickly, take her hands, lift her face, laugh at her with all the false gaiety you can summon:
“Kim, listen to me! Listen! Darling, I could come every night! We could talk the old talk, do the old things! It would be like a year ago, playing, having fun! Long walks in the moonlight, the merry-go-round at White City, the hot dogs at Coral Beach, the boats on the river—anything and everything you say, darling, if only—”
She cuts across your rapid, pitiable gaiety:
“It’s no use.”
“Kim! One hour every evening. Just one. Or half an hour. Any time you say. Fifteen minutes. Five minutes. One minute to see you, that’s all. That’s all.”
You bury your head in her limp, dead hands, and you feel the involuntary quiver shoot through her at your rapid contact. After a moment, she dares to move, slightly. She leans back, her eyes tightly closed, and says, simply: “I am afraid.”
“Why?”
“I have been taught to be afraid, that’s all.”
“Damn the people and their customs and their old-wives tales!”
“Talking won’t stop the fear.”
You want to grasp, hold, stop her, shake sense into her, to clasp her trembling and comfort it as you would a wild bird trying to escape your fingers. “Stop it, stop it, Kim!”
Her trembling gradually passes like movements on a disturbed water pool calming and relaxing. She sinks down upon the bed and her voice is old in a young throat. “All right, darling.” A pause. “Anything you say.” Swallowing. “Anything you wish. If—it makes you happy.”
You try to be happy. You try to burst with joy. You try to smile. You look down upon her as she continues talking vaguely:
“Whatever you say. Anything, my darling.”
You venture to say, “You won’t be afraid.”
“Oh, no.” Her breath
