You excuse yourself. “I just had to see you, you understand? I just had to!”
Her eyes are bright and focused now on you. “I know, Paul, how it must feel. I’ll meet you outside the house in a few minutes. I’ll have to make an excuse to mother and dad to get out past them.”
You raise the window and put one leg out and then turn to look back up at her before vanishing. “Kim, I love you.”
She says nothing, but stares blankly, and shuts the window when you are outside, and she goes away, dimming lights. Held by the dark, you weep with something not quite sorrow, not quite joy. You walk to the corner to wait out the time.
Across the street, past a lilac shrub, a man walks stiffly. There is something familiar about him. You remember. He is the man who accosted you earlier. He is dead, too, and walking through a world that is alien only because it is alive. He goes on along the street, as if in search of something.
Kim is beside you now.
An ice cream sundae is a most wonderful thing. Resting cool, a small white mountain capped by a frock of chocolate and contained in glass, it is something you stare at with spoon poised.
You put some of the ice cream in your mouth, sucking the cold. You pause. The light in your eyes embers down. You sit back, removed.
“What’s wrong?” The old man behind the ancient fountain looks at you, concerned.
“Nothing.”
“Ice cream taste funny?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“Fly in it?” He bends forward.
“No.”
“You ain’t eating it?” he says.
“I don’t want to.” You push it away from you and your lump of heart lowers itself precariously between the lonely bleak walls of your lungs. “I am sick. I am not hungry. I can’t eat.”
Kim is at your left, eating slowly. At your sign, she lays aside her spoon, also, and cannot eat.
You sit very straight, staring ahead into nothing. How can you tell them that your throat muscles will no longer contract efficiently enough to allow food. How can you speak of the frustrated hunger flaming in you as you watch Kim’s dainty jaw muscles close and open, finishing the white coolness of the ice within her mouth, tasting and liking it.
How can you explain of the crumpled shape of your stomach lying like a dried apricot against your peritoneum? How describe that desiccated rope of intestine that is yours now? That lies coiled neatly, as if you heaped it by hand at the bottom of a cold pit?
Rising, you have no coin in your hand, and Kim pays, and together you swing wide the door and walk out into the stars.
“Kim—”
“That’s all right. I understand,” she says. Taking your arm, she walks down toward the park. Wordless, you realize that her hand is very faintly against you. It is there, but your feeling of it is lost. Beneath your feet, the sidewalk loses its solid tread. It now moves without shock or bump below you, a dream.
Just to be talking, Kim says, “Isn’t that a marvelous smell on the air tonight? Lilacs in bloom.”
You test the air. You can smell nothing. Panic rises in you. You try again, but it is no use.
Two people pass you in the dark, and as they drift by, nodding to Kim and you, as they gain distance behind, one of them comments, fading, “—Don’t you smell something— funny? I wonder if a dog was killed in the street today …”
“I don’t see anything—”
“—well—”
“KIM! COME BACK!”
You grasp her fleeing hand. It seems that it is this moment she has waited for in a tensed, apprehensive, and semi-gracious silence. The passing of the people and their few words are a trigger to thrust her away, almost screaming from you.
You catch her arm. Wordless, you struggle against her. She beats at you. She twists, and strikes at your binding fingers. You cannot feel her. You cannot feel her doing this! “Kim! Don’t, darling. Don’t run away. Don’t be afraid!”
Her brooch falls to the cement like a beetle. Her heels scuff the hard stony surface. Her breath pants from her. Her eyes are wide. One hand escapes and stretches out behind her as she leans back, using her weight to pull free. The shadows enclose your struggle. Only your breath sounds. Her face glows taut and not soft any more, breaking apart in the light. There are no words. You pull back, your way. She pulls in her direction. You try to speak softly, soothingly, “Don’t let people frighten you about me. Calm down—”
Her words are bitten out in whispers:
“Let go of me. Let go. Let go.”
“No, I can’t do that.”
Again the wordless, dark movement of bodies and arms. She weakens and hangs limply sobbing against you. At your touch she trembles very deeply. You hold her close, teeth chattering. “I want you, Kim. Don’t leave me. I had such plans. To go to Chicago some night. It only takes an hour on the train. Listen to me. Think of it. To eat the most elegant food across fine linen and silver from one another! To let wine lift us by our bootstraps. To stuff ourselves full. And now—” you declare harshly, eyes gleaming in the leaf-dark, “Now—” You hold your thinned stomach, pressing in that traitor thing lying dry and twisted as a paint tube there. “And now I can’t taste the cool of ice cream, or the ripeness of berries, or apple pie or—or—”
Kim speaks.
You tilt your head. “What did you say?”
She speaks again.
“Speak louder,” you ask of her, holding her close. “I can’t hear you.” She speaks and you cry out, bending near. And you hear absolutely nothing at first, and then, behind a thick cotton wall, her voice says,
“Paul, it’s no use. You see? You understand now?”
You release her. “I wanted to see the neon lights. I wanted to find the flowers as they were, to touch your hand, your lips. But, oh god, first my taste goes, then I cannot eat at all, and now my skin is like concrete. And now I cannot hear your voice, Kim. It’s like an echo in a lost world.”
A great wind shakes the universe, but you do not feel it.
“Paul, this is not the way. The things you desire can’t be had this way. It takes more than desire to insure these things.”
“I want to kiss you.”
“Can your lips feel?”
“No.”
“Love depends on more than thought, Paul, because thought itself is built upon the senses. If we cannot talk together, hear together, or feel, or smell the night, or taste the food, what is there left for us?”
You know it is no use, but with a broken voice you argue on: “I can still see you. And I remember what it WAS like!”
“Illusion. Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending. And we have no way to tend it if you cannot use your senses.”
“It’s so unfair! I want life!”
“You will live, Paul, I promise that. But not THIS way, the impossible way. You’ve been dead over half a year, and I’ll be going to the hospital in another month—”
You stop. You are very cold. Holding to her shoulders, you stare into her soft, moving face. “What?”
“Yes. The hospital. Our child. Our child. You see, you didn’t have to come back. You are always with me, Paul. You are alive.” She turns you around. “Now I’ll ask you. Go back. Everything balances. Believe that. Leave me with a better memory than this of you, Paul. Everything will work for the best, eventually. Go back where you came from.”
You cannot even cry. Your tear-ducts are shriveled. The thought of the baby comes upon you, and sounds almost correct. But the rebellion in you will not be so easily put down. You turn to shout again at Kim, and without a sign, she sinks slowly to the ground. Bending over her, you hear her few weak words:
“The shock. The hospital. Quick. The shock.”
You walk down the street, she lies in your arms. A grey film forms over your left eye. “I can’t see. The air does things to me! Soon, I’ll be blind in both eyes, Kim, it’s so unfair!”
“Faith,” she whispers, close, you barely hear the word.
You begin to run, stumbling. A car passes. You shout at it. The car stops and a moment later you and Kim and the man in the car are roaring soundlessly toward the hospital.
In the middle of the tempest, her talking stands out. “Have faith, Paul. I believe in the future. You believe it too. Nature is not that cruel or unfair. There is compensation for you somewhere.”
Your left eye is now completely blind. Your right eye blurs ominously.
Kim is gone!
The hospital attendants run her away from you. You did not even say goodbye to her, nor she to you! You stand outside, helpless, and then turn and walk away from the building. The outlines of the world blur. From the hospital a pulsing issues forth and turns your thoughts a pale red. Like a big red drum it beats in your head, with loud, soft, hard, easy rhythms.
You walk stupidly across streets, cars just miss striking you down. You watch people eat in gleaming glass windows. Watch hot dogs sizzling juices in a Greek restaurant. Watch people lift forks, knives. Everything glides by on noiseless lubricant of silence. You float. Your ears are solidly blocked. Your nose is clogged. The red drum beats louder, with an even tempo. You long and strive and strain
