The beer he understood. He knew how to pace it. And the beer sometimes brought him close to remembering …
… And it was a realm he’d seen out there. People-so many of them. Now and then it was there again, a great gossamer whole. He saw her … who was she? She said … And then it was gone. “I will, I’ll do it. If I die again trying, I’ll do it.”
Had he really said that to them? How could he have imagined such things, things so very far afield of his own world, which was full of the solid and the real, and why these odd flashes of being far away, back home, in the city of his boyhood?
He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything that mattered anymore.
He knew he was Michael Curry, that he was forty-eight years old, that he had a couple of million socked away, and property that amounted to almost that, which was a very good thing because his construction company was shut down, cold. He could no longer run it. He’d lost his best carpenters and painters to the other crews around town. He’d lost the big job that had meant so much, the restoration of the old bed-and-breakfast hotel on Union Street.
He knew that if he took off his gloves and started touching anything-the walls, the floor, the beer can, the copy of David Copperfield which lay open beside him-he’d start getting these flashes of meaningless information and he’d go crazy. That is, if he wasn’t already crazy.
He knew he had been happy before he drowned, not perfectly happy, but happy. His life had been good.
The morning of the big event, he had awakened late, needing a day off, and it was a good time for it. His men were doing just fine out there, and maybe he wouldn’t check on them. It was May 1 and the oddest memory came back to him-of a long drive out of New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast to Florida when he was a boy. It must have been the Easter vacation, but he really didn’t know for sure, and all those who would have known-his mother, his father, his grandparents-were dead.
What he remembered was the clear green water on that white beach, and how warm it had been, and that the sand was like sugar under his feet.
They had all gone down to the waves to swim at sunset; not the slightest chill in the air; and though the great orange sun still hung in the blue western sky, there was a half moon shining straight overhead. His mother had pointed it out to him. “Look, Michael.” Even his father seemed to love it, his father who never noticed such things had said in a soft voice that it was a beautiful place.
It had hurt him to remember this. The cold in San Francisco was the one thing he powerfully resented, and he could never tell anyone why afterwards-that such a memory of southern warmth had inspired him to go out that day to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Was there any place colder in all of the Bay Area than Ocean Beach? He had known how drab and forbidding the water would look under the bleached and sullen sky. He had known how the wind would cut through his clothes.
Nevertheless he’d gone. Alone to be at Ocean Beach on this dim, colorless afternoon with visions of southern waters, of driving with the top down on the old Packard convertible through the soft caressing southern wind.
He didn’t turn on the car radio as he drove through town. So he didn’t hear the high tide warnings. But what if he had? He knew Ocean Beach was dangerous. Every year people were washed out, natives as well as tourists.
Maybe he’d been thinking a little about that when he went out on the rocks just below the Cliff House Restaurant. Treacherous, yes, always, and slippery. But he wasn’t much afraid of falling, or of the sea, or of anything. And he was thinking about the south again, about summer evenings in New Orleans when the jasmine was blooming. He was thinking of the smell of the four o’clocks in his grandmother’s yard.
The wave must have knocked him unconscious. He had no memory at all of being washed out. Just that distinct recollection of rising into space, of seeing his body out there, tossed on the surf, of seeing people waving and pointing, and others rushing into the restaurant to call for assistance. Yes, he knew what they were doing, all of these people. Seeing them was not really like looking down on people from above. It was like knowing all about them. And how purely buoyant and safe he’d felt up there; why, safe didn’t even begin to describe it. He was free, so free he could not comprehend their anxiety, why they were so concerned about his body being tossed about.
Then the other part began. And that must have been when he was really dead, and all the wonderful things were shown to him, and the other dead were there, and he understood, understood all the simplest and the most complex things, and why he had to go back, yes, the doorway, the promise, shot down suddenly and weightlessly into the body lying on the deck of the ship, the body that had been dead drowned for an hour out there, into the aches and the pains, and come back alive staring up, knowing it all, ready to do exactly what they had wanted of him. All that splendid knowledge!
In those first few seconds, he tried desperately to tell of where he’d been and the things he’d seen, the great long adventure. Surely he had! But all he could remember now was the intensity of the pain in his chest, and in his hands and his feet, and the dim figure of a woman near him. A fragile being with a pale delicate face, all of her hair hidden by a dark cap, her gray eyes flickering for a second like lights in front of him. In a soft voice, she’d told him to be calm, that they would take care of him.
Impossible to think that this little woman had gotten him out of the sea, and pumped the water out of his lungs. But he had not understood that she was his savior at that moment.
Men were lifting him, putting him on a stretcher, and strapping him down, and he was filled with pain. The wind was whipping his face. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. The stretcher was rising in the air.
Confusion after that. Had he blacked out again? Had that been the moment of true and total forgetting? No one could confirm or deny, it seemed, what had happened on the flight in. Only that they had rushed him to shore, where the ambulance and the reporters were waiting.
Cameras flashing, that he did recall, people saying his name. The ambulance itself, yes, and someone trying to stick a needle into his vein. He thought he heard his Aunt Vivian’s voice. He begged them to stop. He had to sit up. They couldn’t strap him down again, no!
“Hold on, Mr. Curry, just hold on. Hey, help me here with this guy!” They were strapping him down again. They were treating him as if he were a prisoner. He fought. But it was no use; they’d shot something into his arm, he knew it. He could see the darkness coming.
Then they came back, those he had seen out there; they began to talk again. “I understand,” he said. “I won’t let it happen. I’ll go home. I know where it is. I remember … ”
When he had awakened, it was to bright artificial light. A hospital room. He was hooked to machines. His best friend, Jimmy Barnes, was sitting next to the bed. He tried to speak to Jimmy, but then the nurses and the doctors surrounded him.
They were touching him, his hands, his feet, asking him questions. But he couldn’t concentrate on the proper answers. He kept seeing things-fleeting images of nurses, orderlies, hospital hallways. What is all this? He knew the doctor’s name-Randy Morris-and that he’d kissed his wife, Deenie, before he left home. So what? Things were literally popping into his head. He couldn’t stand it. It was like being half awake and half asleep, feverish, worried.
He shuddered, trying to clear his head. “Listen,” he said. “I’m trying.” After all, he knew what this was all about, the touching, that he’d been drowned and they wanted to see if there had been any brain damage. “But you needn’t bother. I’m fine. I’m all right. I’ve got to get out of here, and get packed. I have to go back home immediately … ”