“Escape?” the other said. “Escape? Will you telephone for the ambulance, in God’s dear name?”
“I’ll telephone, never you fear!” the doctor cried. He was on the earth below the porch now, in the hard black wind, already moving away, beginning to run suddenly and heavily on his thick sedentary legs. “Dont you dare to try!” he cried back. “Dont you dare to try!” He still had the flashlight; Wilbourne watched the beam of it jouncing on toward the oleander hedge as though it too, the little futile moth-light beam, struggled too against the constant weight of the black pitiless wind. He didn’t forget that, Wilbourne thought, watching it.
But then he probably never forgot anything in his life except that he was alive once, must have been born alive at least. Then at that word he became aware of his heart, as though all profound terror had merely waited until he should prompt himself. He could feel the hard black wind too as he blinked after the floundering light until it passed through the hedge and vanished; he blinked steadily in the black wind, he could not stop it. My lachrymae are not functioning, he thought, hearing his roaring and laboring heart. As though it were pumping sand not blood, not liquid, he thought. Trying to pump it. It’s just this wind I think I cant breathe in, it’s not that I really cant breathe, find something somewhere to breathe because apparently the heart can stand anything anything anything.
He turned and crossed the porch. This time as before he and the black steady wind were like two creatures trying to use the same single entrance. Only it dont really want to come in, he thought. Dont need to. Dont have to. It’s just interfering for the fun, the hell of it. He could feel it on the door when he touched the knob, then, close, he could hear it too, a sibilance, a whisper. It was risible, it was almost a chuckling, leaning its weight on the door along with his weight, making the door easy, too easy, surreptitious, making its weight really felt only when he came to close the door and this time just too easy because so steady, just risible and chuckling; it did not really want to come in. He closed the door, watching the faint light which fell into the hall from the lamp inside the bedroom suck, shift and recover steadily as what of the wind might have remained in the house if it had wanted to, might have been trapped inside the house by the closing door, licked quietly out through the ultimate closing crack, risible and constant, not at all departing, and turned listening, his head slanted a little toward the bedroom door with listening. But no sound came from beyond it, no sound in the hall but the wind murmuring against the door of the barren rented hall where he stood, quiet with listening, thinking quietly, I guessed wrong.
It’s incredible, not that I should have had to guess but that I should have guessed so wrong not meaning the doctor, not thinking about the doctor now (With a part of his mind he was not using now he could see it: the other neat, tight, brown-stained wind-proof tongue-and-groove hall, the flashlight still burning on the table beside the hurried bag, the thick bulging varicose planted calves as he had first seen them beneath the nightshirt, planted outraged and convinced and unassuageable by anything else but this; he could even hear the voice not raised but risen, a little shrill, unappeasable too, into the telephone: “And a policeman. A policeman. Two if necessary.
Do you hear?” He’ll wake her too, he thought, seeing this too: the upper room, the gorgon-headed woman in the gray high-necked gown risen onto her elbow in the stale gray bed, her head cocked to listen and without surprise, who would be hearing only what she had been expecting for four days to hear. She will come back with him—if he himself comes back, he thought. If he dont just sit outside with the pistol to guard the exits. And maybe she will even be there too.) Because this didn’t matter, it was just like putting a letter into the mail; it didn’t matter what box, only that he should have waited so late to mail the letter, he, after the four years and then the twenty months, the almost two years more and then done, complete.
I have made a bust even of that part of my life which I threw away, he thought, motionless in the risible murmur of the waiting and unhurried wind, his head turned slightly toward the bedroom door with listening, thinking with that trivial layer of his mind which he did not need to use, So it’s not just the wind I cant breathe in so maybe forever after I have gained, earned, some little of suffocation, beginning to breathe not faster but deeper, he could not stop it, each breath shallower and shallower and harder and harder and nearer and nearer the top of his lungs until in a moment it would escape the lungs altogether and there would indeed be no breath left anywhere forever, blinking steadily and painfully at the sudden granulation of his lids as though the black sand dammed forever of any moisture at which his strong heart scooped and surged were about to burst out of him through all his ducts and pores as they say the sweat of agony does, thinking. Steady now. Careful now. When she comes back this time she will have to begin to hold on.
He crossed the hall to the bedroom door. There was still no sound save the wind (there was a window, the sash did not fit; the black wind whispered and murmured at it but did not enter, it did not want to, did not need to). She lay on her back, her eyes closed, the nightgown (that garment which she had never owned, never worn before) twisted about her just under the arms, the body not sprawled, not abandoned, but on the contrary even a little tense.
The whisper of the black wind filled the room but coming from nothing, so that presently it began to seem to him that the sound was rather the murmur of the lamp itself sitting on an upended packing case beside the bed, the rustle and murmur of faint dingy light itself on her flesh—the waist ever narrower than he had believed, anticipated, the thighs merely broad since they were flat too, the swell and neat nip of belly between the navel’s flattened crease and the neat close cupping of female hair, and nothing else, no croaching shadow of ineradicable blackness, no shape of death cuckolding him; nothing to see, yet it was there, he not permitted to watch his own cuckolding but only to look down upon the invisible pregnancy of his horning. And then he could not breathe and he began to back away from the door but it was too late because she was lying on the bed looking at him.
He didn’t move. He couldn’t help his breathing but he didn’t move, one hand on the door frame and his foot already lifted for the first step back, the eyes open full upon him though still profoundly empty of sentience. Then he saw it begin: the I. It was like watching a fish rise in water—a dot, a minnow, and still increasing; in a second there would be no more pool but all sentience. He crossed to the bed in three strides, fast but quiet; he put his hand flat on her chest, his voice quiet, steady, insistent: “No, Charlotte. Not yet. You can hear me. Go back. Go back, now.
It’s all right now,” quiet and urgent and contained out of his need, as though departure only followed farewell, and good-bye was not something to precede the going away—provided there was time for it. “That’s right,” he said. “Go back. It’s not time yet. I will tell you when the time comes.” And she heard him from somewhere because at once the fish became the minnow again and then the dot; in another second the eyes would be empty again and blank. Only he lost her. He watched it: the dot growing too fast this time, no serene minnow but a vortex of cognizant pupil in the yellow stare spinning to blackness while he watched, the black shadow not on the belly but in the eyes. Her teeth caught her lower lip, she rolled her head and tried to rise, struggling against the flat of his hand on her breast.
“I’m hurting. Jesus, where is he? Where’s he gone? Tell him to give me something. Quick.”
“No,” he said. “He cant. You’ve got to hurt. That’s what you’ve got to hold on to.” Now it must have been laughing; it couldn’t have been anything else. She lay back and began to thresh from hip to hip, still threshing as he untwisted the gown and drew it down and covered her.
“I thought you said you would do the holding.”
“I am. But you’ve got to hold on too. You’ve got to do most of it for a while. Just a little while. The ambulance will be here soon, but you must stay here and hurt now. Do you hear? You cant go back now.”
“Then take the knife and cut it out of me. All of it. Deep. So there wont be anything left but just a shell
