Slowly the doctor studied Lightner again. The man was fastening his briefcase. He examined his airline ticket, appeared to find it satisfactory, and then slipped it into his coat.
“Let me say one thing further,” said Lightner, “and then I must catch my plane. Don’t tell this story to others. They won’t believe you. Only those who have seen such things believe in them. It’s tragic, but invariably true.”
“Yes, I know it is,” said the doctor. So much he wanted to ask, yet he could not. “Have you …?” He stopped.
“Yes, I’ve seen him,” said Lightner. “It was frightening, indeed. Just as you described.” He rose to go.
“What is he? A spirit? A ghost?”
“I don’t know, actually, what he is. All the stories are very similar. Things don’t change there. They go on, year after year. But I must go, and again I thank you, and if you should ever wish to talk to me again, you know how to reach me. You have my card.” Lightner extended his hand. “Good-bye.”
“Wait. The daughter, what became of her? The intern out west?”
“Why, she’s a surgeon, now,” Lightner said, glancing at his watch. “Neurosurgeon, I believe. Just passed her examinations. Board-certified, is that what they call it? But then I don’t know her either, you see. I only hear about her now and then. Our paths did cross once.” He broke off, then gave a quick almost formal smile. “Good-bye, Doctor, and thank you again.”
The doctor sat there, thinking, for a long time. He did feel better, infinitely better. There was no denying it. He had no regret that he had told the tale. In fact, the entire encounter seemed a gift to him, something sent by fate to lift from his shoulders the worst burden he’d ever borne. Lightner knew and understood the whole case. Lightner knew the daughter in California.
Lightner would tell that young neurosurgeon what she ought to know, that is, if he hadn’t done it already. Yes, the burden was lifted. The burden was gone. Whether it weighed upon Lightner didn’t matter.
Then the most curious afterthought came to the doctor, something which hadn’t occurred to him for years. He’d never been in that big Garden District house during a rainstorm. Why, how lovely it would have been to see rain through those long windows, to hear rain on those porch roofs. Too bad about that, missing such a thing. He’d thought about it often at the time, but he always missed the rain. And rain in New Orleans was so beautiful.
Well, he was letting go of it all, was he not? Again, he found himself responding to Lightner’s assurances as if they had been words spoken in the confessional, words with some religious authority. Yes, let it all go.
He signaled the waitress. He was hungry. He would like a breakfast now that he could eat. And without thinking much about it, he took Lightner’s card out of his pocket, glanced at the phone numbers-the numbers he might call if he had questions, the numbers he never intended to call-and then he tore the card into little pieces and put them in the ashtray, and then he set them afire with a match.
Two
NINE P.M. THE room was dark, save for the bluish light of the television. Miss Havisham, was it not, a wraith in a wedding dress from his beloved Great Expectations.
Through the clear, unadorned windows he could see the lights of downtown San Francisco when he chose to look-a constellation burning through the thin fog, and just below, the peaked roofs of the smaller Queen Anne houses across Liberty Street. How he loved Liberty Street. His house was the tallest on the block, a mansion once perhaps, now only a beautiful house, rising majestically among humbler cottages, above the noise and the bustle of the Castro.
He had “restored” this house. He knew every nail, every beam, every cornice. Shirtless in the sun, he had laid the tiles of the roof. He had even poured the concrete of the sidewalk.
Now he felt safe in his house, and safe nowhere else. And for four weeks he had not been out of this room, except to enter the small adjacent bathroom.
Hour by hour, he lay in bed, hands hot inside the black leather gloves which he could not and would not take off, staring at the ghostly black-and-white television screen in front of him. He was letting the television shape his dreams through the various videotapes he loved, the videotapes of the movies he’d watched years ago with his mother. They were “the house movies” to him now, because all of them had not only wonderful stories and wonderful people who had become his heroes and heroines, but wonderful houses. Rebecca had Manderley. Great Expectations had Miss Havisham’s ruined mansion. Gaslight had the lovely London town house on the square. The Red Shoes had the mansion by the sea where the lovely dancer went to hear the news that she would soon be the company’s prima ballerina.
Yes, the house movies, the movies of childhood dreams, of characters as great as the houses. He drank beer after beer as he watched. He drifted in and out of sleep. His hands positively hurt in the gloves. He did not answer the phone. He did not answer the door. Aunt Vivian took care of it.
Now and then Aunt Vivian would come into his room. She would give him another beer, or some food. He rarely ate the food. “Michael, please eat,” she would say. He would smile. “Later, Aunt Viv.”
He would not see or speak to anyone except Dr. Morris, but Dr. Morris couldn’t help him. His friends couldn’t help him either. And they didn’t want to talk to him anymore. They were tired of hearing him talk about being dead for an hour and then coming back. And he certainly did not want to talk to the hundreds who wanted to see a demonstration of his psychic power.
He was sick to death of his psychic power. Didn’t anyone understand? It was a parlor trick, this taking off his gloves and touching things and seeing some simple, mundane image. “You got this pencil from a woman in your office yesterday. Her name’s Gert,” or “This locket. This morning, you took it out and you decided you’d wear it but you didn’t really want to. You wanted to wear the pearls, and you couldn’t find them.”
Just a physical thing, this, an antenna that maybe all human beings had thousands of years ago.
Didn’t anyone appreciate the real tragedy? That he could not remember what he saw when he was drowned. “Aunt Viv,” he would say, still trying now and then to explain it to her, “I really did see people up there. We were dead. All of us were dead. And I had a choice about coming back. And I was sent back for a purpose.”
Pale shadow of his dead mother, Aunt Vivian would only nod her head. “I know, darling. Maybe in time, you’ll remember.”
In time.
His friends had gotten more harsh at the end. “Michael, you’re talking crazy. This happens that people drown and they’re brought back. There’s no special purpose.”
“That’s nuthouse talk, Mike.”
Therese had cried and cried. “Look, there’s no use me being here, Michael. You’re not the same person.”
No. Not the same person. That person drowned. Over and over he tried to remember the rescue-the woman who had got him up out of the water and brought him around. If only he could talk to her again, if only Dr. Morris would find her … He just wanted to hear it from her own lips that he’d said nothing. He just wanted to take off his gloves and hold her hand in his when he asked her. Maybe through her he could remember …
Dr. Morris wanted him to come in for further evaluation.
“Leave me alone. Just find that woman. I know you can reach her. You told me she called you. She told you her name.”
He was through with hospitals, with brain scans and electroencephalograms, through with shots and pills.