“Jack…”
…Jack…
A jolt, as of electricity, to the back of my neck.
Jack… Jack Lamb…
My eyelids fluttered open.
A gray ocean surrounded me, picked out by vague shapes.
Jack Lamb… Jack…
Another jolt, more intense than the first. I tried to move, but I was very weak and I succeeded only in turning my head. Someone passed across my field of vision, accompanied by a perfumey scent. Wanting to catch their notice, I made a scratchy noise in my throat. The effort caused me to pass out.
Jack…
“Jack? Are you awake?” A woman’s voice.
“Yeah,” I said, my tongue thick, throat raw.
Something was inserted between my lips and a cool liquid soothed the rawness. My chest hurt. My whole body hurt.
“How’s that? Better?” The voice had a familiar ring.
“I can’t see,” I said. “Everything’s a blur.”
“The doctor says you’ll be seeing fine in a few days.”
I asked for more water and, after I had drunk, I said, “I know you… don’t I?”
“Of course. Jocundra… Jo.” A pause. “Your partner. We live together. Don’t you remember?”
“I think. Yeah.”
“You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. Your memory will be hazy for awhile.”
“What happened to me?”
“You were shot. The important thing is, you’re going to be fine.”
“Who shot me? Why… what happened?”
“I’ll tell you soon. I promise. You don’t need the stress now.”
“I want to know who shot me!”
“You have to trust me,” she said, placing a hand on my chest. “There’s psychological damage as well as physical. We have to go cautiously. I’ll tell you when you’re strong enough. Won’t you trust me ’til then?”
I asked her to come closer.
Something swam toward me through the gray. I made out a crimson mouth and enormous brown eyes. Gradually, the separate features resolved into a face that, though blurred, was indisputably open and lovely.
“You’re beautiful,” I said.
“Thank you.” A pause. “It’s been awhile since you told me that.”
Her face withdrew. I couldn’t find her in the murk. Anxious, I called out. “I’m here,” she said. “I’m just getting something.”
“What?”
“Cream to rub on your chest and shoulders. It’ll make you feel better.”
She sat on the bed—I felt the mattress indent—and she began massaging me. Each caress gave me a shock, albeit gentler than the ones I had felt initially. Soft hands spread the cream across my chest and I began to relax, to feel repentant that I had neglected her. I offered apology for doing so, saying that I must have been preoccupied.
Her lips brushed my forehead. “It’s okay. Actually, I’m hopeful…”
“Hopeful? About what?”
“It’s nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“I’m hoping some good will come of all this,” she said. “We’ve been having our problems lately. And I hope this time we spend together, while you recuperate, it’ll make you remember how much I love you.”
I groped for her hand, found it. We stayed like that a while, our fingers mixing together. A white shape melted up from the grayness. I strained to identify it and realized it was her breast sheathed in white cloth.
“I’m up here,” she said, laughter in her voice, and leaned closer so I could see her face again. “Do you feel up to answering a few questions? The doctor said I should test your memory. So we can learn if there’s been any significant loss.”
“Yeah, okay. I’m feeling more together now.”
I heard papers rustling and asked what she was doing.
“They gave me some questions to ask. I can’t find them.” More rustling. “Here they are. The first one’s a gimmee. Do you recall your name?”
“Jack,” I said confidently. “Jack Lamb.”
“And what do you do? Your profession?”
I opened my mouth, ready to spit out the answer. When nothing came to me, I panicked. I probed around in the gray nothing that seemed to have settled over my brain, beginning to get desperate. She touched the inside of my wrist, a touch that left a trail of sparkling sensation on my skin, and told me not to force it. And then I saw the answer, saw it as clearly as I might see a shining coin stuck in silt at the bottom of a well, the first of a horde of memories waiting to be unearthed, a treasure of anecdote and event.
Firmly, and with a degree of pride as befitted my station, I said, “I’m a financier.”
Stars Seen Through Stone
I was smoking a joint on the steps of the public library when a cold wind blew in from no cardinal point, but from the top of the night sky, a force of pure perpendicularity that bent the sparsely leaved boughs of the old alder shadowing the steps straight down toward the Earth, as if a gigantic someone directly above were pursing his lips and aiming a long breath directly at the ground. For the duration of that gust, fifteen or twenty seconds, my hair did not flutter but was pressed flat to the crown of my head and the leaves and grass and weeds on the lawn also lay flat. The phenomenon had a distinct border—leaves drifted along the sidewalk, testifying that a less forceful, more fitful wind presided beyond the perimeter of the lawn. No one else appeared to notice. The library, a blunt nineteenth century relic of undressed stone, was not a popular point of assembly at any time of day, and the sole potential witness apart from myself was an elderly gentleman who was hurrying toward McGuigan’s Tavern at a pace that implied a severe alcohol dependency. This happened seven months prior to the events central to this story, but I offer it to suggest that a good deal of strangeness goes unmarked by the world (at least by the populace of Black William, Pennsylvania), and, when taken in sum, such occurrences may be evidence that strangeness is visited upon us with some regularity and we only notice its extremes.
Ten years ago, following my wife’s graduation from Yale Law, we set forth in our decrepit Volvo, heading for northern California, where we hoped to establish a community of sorts with friends who had moved to that region the previous year. We chose to drive on blue highways for their scenic value and decided on a route that ran through Pennsylvania’s Bittersmith Hills, knuckled chunks of coal and granite, forested with leafless oaks and butternut, ash and elder, that—under heavy snow and threatening skies—composed an ominous prelude to the smoking redbrick town nestled in their heart. As we approached Black William, the Volvo began to rattle, the engine died, and we coasted to a stop on a curve overlooking a forbidding vista: row houses the color of dried blood huddled together along the wend of a sluggish, dark river (the Polozny), visible through a pall of gray smoke that settled from the chimneys of a sprawling prisonlike edifice—also of brick—on the opposite shore. The Volvo proved to be a total loss. Since our funds were limited, we had no recourse other than to find temporary housing and take jobs so as to pay for a new car in which to continue our trip. Andrea, whose specialty was labor law, caught on with a firm involved in fighting for the rights of embattled steelworkers. I hired on at the mill, where I encountered three part-time musicians lacking a singer. This led to that, that to this, Andrea and I grew apart in our obsessions, had affairs, divorced, and, before we realized it, the better part of a decade had rolled past. Though initially I felt trapped in an ugly, dying town, over the years I had developed an honest affection for Black William and its citizens, among whom I came to number myself.
After a brief and perhaps illusory flirtation with fame and fortune, my band broke up, but I managed to build a home recording studio during its existence and this became the foundation of a career. I landed a small business grant and began to record local bands on my own label, Soul Kiss Records. Most of the CDs I released did poorly, but in my third year of operation, one of my projects, a metal group calling themselves Meanderthal, achieved a regional celebrity and I sold management rights and the masters for their first two albums to a major label. This success gave me a degree of visibility and my post office box was flooded with demos from bands all over the country. Over the next six years I released a string of minor successes and acquired an industry-wide reputation of having an eye for talent. It had been my immersion in the music business that triggered the events leading to my divorce and, while Andrea was happy for me, I think it galled her that I had exceeded her low expectations. After a cooling-off period, we had become contentious friends and whenever we met for drinks or lunch, she would offer deprecating comments about the social value of my enterprise, and about my girlfriend, Mia, who was nine years younger than I, heavily tattooed, and—in Andrea’s words—dressed “like a color-blind dominatrix.”