What must this mean, Michael tried to figure out. Not that we suffer guilt for what we do, for we believe it is morally right to control the birth of our young, but that we have uneasy dreams of all those little beings washed, unborn, into eternity? Or was it mere fear of the beings themselves who want to claim us-eternally free adolescents-and make us parents. Fetuses from hell! He laughed bitterly at the whole idea in spite of himself.
Look at John Carpenter’s The Thing, with its screaming fetal heads! And what about the old classic Rosemary’s Baby, for God’s sake, and that silly movie It’s Alive, about the monster baby who murdered the milk man when it got hungry. The image was inescapable. Babies-fetuses. He saw it everywhere he turned.
He pondered it just as he used to ponder the magnificent houses and elegant persons in old black-and-white horror films of his youth.
No use trying to talk about all this with his friends. They had believed Judith was in the right; and they would never understand the distinctions he was trying to make. Horror movies are our troubled dreams, he thought. And we are obsessed now with birth, and birth gone wrong, and birth turned against us. And back to the Happy Hour Theater he went in his memory. He was watching The Bride of Frankenstein again. So science had scared them back then, and even further back when Mary Shelley had written down her inspiring visions.
Oh, well, he couldn’t figure out these things. He wasn’t really a historian or social scientist. Maybe he wasn’t clever enough. He was a contractor by trade. Best to stick to refinishing oak floors and stripping brass faucets.
And besides, he didn’t hate women. He didn’t. He didn’t fear them either. Women were just people, and sometimes they were better people than men, gentler, kinder. He liked their company better than the company of men most of the time. And it had never surprised him that, except for this one issue, they usually understood what he had to say more sympathetically than men did.
When Elizabeth called, eager to kindle the old flame, he was happy, very happy, to get on a plane for New York. Their weekend was bliss together, except for his elaborate precautions against conception, a matter which had now become an obsession. They would make it work again, they both knew it. They were one step from a rare moment of fine excitement. But Elizabeth didn’t want to leave the East Coast, and Michael could not imagine Great Expectations in Manhattan. They would write to each other, they would think about it; they would talk long distance. They would wait and see.
As time passed, Michael lost a little faith that he would ever have the love he wanted.
But his was a world in which many adults did not have that love. They had friends, freedom, style, riches, career, but not that love, and this was the condition of modern life and so it was for him, too. And he grew to take this for granted.
He had plenty of comrades on the job, old college buddies, no shortage of female companionship when he wanted it. And as he reached his forty-eighth birthday, he figured there was still time for everything. He felt and looked young, as did the other people his age around him. Why, he still had those damned freckles. And women still gave him the eye, that was certain. In fact, he found it easier to attract them now than when he had been an overeager young man.
Who could say? Maybe his little casual affair with Therese, the young woman he’d recently met at the Symphony, would start to mean something. She was too young, he knew that, he was angry with himself on that score, but then she would call and say: “Michael, I expected to hear from you by this time! You’re really manipulating me!” Whatever that meant. And off they would go to supper and her place after that.
But was it only a deep love that he missed? Was there something else? One morning, he woke up and realized in a flash that the summer he had been waiting for all these years was never going to come. And the miserable damp of the place had worked itself into the marrow of his bones. There would never be warm nights full of the smell of jasmine. There would never be warm breezes from the river or the Gulf. But this he had to accept, he told himself. After all this was his city now. How could he ever go home?
Yet at times it seemed to him that San Francisco was no longer painted in rich colors of ocher and Roman red; that it had become a drab sepia, and that the dull glare of the perpetually gray sky had permanently blunted his spirits.
Even the beautiful houses he restored seemed sometimes no more than stage sets, devoid of real tradition, fancy traps to capture a past that had never existed, to create a feeling of solidity for people who lived moment to moment in a fear of death bordering on hysteria.
Oh, but he was a lucky man, and he knew it. And surely there were good times and good things to come.
So that was Michael’s life, a life that for all practical purposes was now over, because he had drowned on May 1 and come back, haunted, obsessed, rambling on and on about the living and the dead, unable to remove the black gloves from his hands, fearful of what he might see-the great inundations of meaningless images-and picking up strong emotional impressions even from those whom he did not touch.
A full three and a half months had passed since that awful day. Therese was gone. His friends were gone. And now he was a prisoner of the house on Liberty Street.
He had changed the number on the phone. He was not answering the mountains of mail he received. Aunt Viv went out by the back door to obtain those few supplies for the house which could not be delivered.
In a sweet, polite voice she fielded the few calls. “No, Michael isn’t here anymore.”
He laughed every time he heard it. Because it was true. The papers said he had “disappeared.” That made him laugh too. About every ten days or so, he called Stacy and Jim, just to say he was alive, then hung up. He couldn’t blame them if they didn’t care.
Now in the dark, he lay on his bed, watching again on the mute television screen the familiar old images of Great Expectations. A ghostly Miss Havisham in her tattered wedding garb talked to the young Pip, played by John Mills, who was just setting off for London.
Why was Michael wasting time? He ought to be setting off for New Orleans. But he was too drunk just now for that. Too drunk even to call for an airline schedule. Besides, there was the hope that Dr. Morris would call him, Dr. Morris, who knew this secret number, Dr. Morris to whom Michael had confided his one and only plan.
“If I could get in touch with that woman,” he had told Dr. Morris, “you know, the skipper who rescued me. If I could just take off my gloves and hold her hands when I talk to her, well, maybe I could remember something through her. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“You’re drunk, Michael. I can hear it.”
“Never mind that just now. That’s a given. I’m drunk and I’m going to stay drunk, but listen to what I’m saying. If I could get on that boat again … ”
“Yes?”
“Well, if I could get down on the deck of the boat, and touch the boards with my bare hands … you know, the boards I was lying on … ”
“Michael, that’s insane.”
“Dr. Morris, call her. You can get in touch with her. If you won’t call her, give me her name.”
“What do you mean, call her and tell her you want to crawl around on the deck of her boat, feeling for mental vibrations? Michael, she has a right to be protected from something like that; she may not believe in this psychic power thing.”
“But you believe in it! You know it works!”
“I want you to come back to the hospital.”
Michael had hung up in a rage. No more needles, no more tests, thank you. Over and over again Dr. Morris had called back, but the telephone messages were all the same: “Michael, come in. We’re worried about you. We want to see you.”