Fade. Part 22

A moment of silence, then: "I'm right here," the voice of his uncle somewhere nearby. "I knocked the knife away because we can't talk with a knife between us. And I need to talk to you. To you, not to that voice I keep hearing. That voice isn't you, Ozzie. That voice is the killer, not you. You have to be separated from the voice. You have to resist the voice, fight it, hold it off ..."

See what he's trying to do? He's trying to turn us against each other. And he wants to lock you up. Do you want to be locked up?

No.

That's what he wants to do to you. You have to get rid of him.

But how?

Get that knife. And stick him.

I was astonished to hear those voices in that moonlit courtyard, listening to the boy arguing with himself, the two voices so different, the one harsh and demanding, bent on destruction, and the other young and fragile.

As I listened a wave of sadness stole over me, the kind of sadness that comes from loss-all the people we lose through the years-and now I was losing this boy, my nephew, a poor fader like myself with a savage loose inside him.

Now.

I heard the word with all its urgency and insanity, a single vicious syllable, and saw a stirring in the air, like branches being shaken, a sensation of movement in the moonlight, a scurrying. And I moved, too, leaping toward the knife, half tripping, lunging forward, hands outstretched.

The knife soared into the air before I reached it-he had beaten me to the spot-but once more his possession of the knife gave me an advantage and I was able to see where he must be standing.

I straightened up and kicked, aiming for his stomach, judging its height from the ground. My shoe met the target, sank into the softness of his stomach, deeper than I had hoped, and he bellowed with pain. At the same time the knife fell to the ground, loosened from his grip, and I went after it.

The instant I picked it up, I knew my mistake, knew that I had betrayed where I stood the way he had betrayed himself a moment before. I had also forgotten youth's capacity to absorb and throw off pain and I heard the rush of his body just before he crashed into me, his head b.u.t.ting my chest, taking my breath away, causing me to drop the knife, to emit my own bellow of pain. Before I could recover, his hands were around my neck, not the hands of a thirteen-year-old boy but the steel-like hands of a deadly enemy, ageless, and mad, gaining strength from the madness. The fingers tightened around my neck, mas.h.i.+ng my Adam's apple into my throat, cutting off air-this was how it was to choke-leaving me unable to cry out, my arms thras.h.i.+ng around convulsively. As I fell backward I tried to twist away from him and landed on the ground in a hard thump that sent pain shooting along my spine. My hands reached out desperately as I twisted and fought with all my strength. My right hand somehow found the knife. I managed to grasp the handle, barely aware of my movements but aware of his body pressing against mine, the sweaty cheek against my cheek, the fingers even tighter around my neck and a la.s.situde growing in me as the sense of suffocation took away all desire, all thought, all resistance. I felt myself fading, not the fading of invisibility but a fading away of my entire being into oblivion.

Die, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, die.

The harshness of the voice lit a small fire in my diminis.h.i.+ng consciousness. I knew that I had to resist that madman in the boy, had to make one final effort to defeat him, whether or not I gained breath again. I fought against a gathering darkness that threatened to swallow me up and obliterate me, and managed to open my eyes. Through the mist and fog of my dimming sight, I saw the glint of the knife and remembered that the knife was actually in my hand. I had only to bring the knife down into the flesh of this monster whose fingers were around my throat, who was murdering me. That was all I had to do, but it seemed impossible. I had no strength left. Do it, I told myself, do it. This one last thing. I focused on the knife, felt my eyes bulging achingly as I concentrated the final remnants of my thought processes on it. The knife became my entire world, s.h.i.+ning in the moonlight, poised above the madman I could not see but who was slowly taking my life away. I willed the knife to descend, gathered everything that remained of me and my life into that desire. And I watched the knife finally descending slowly, in downward thrust, and then faster, and I was no longer aware of the fingers that had now become a part of my throat or the blackness threatening the edges of my consciousness or the breathless world in which I was caught and held, knew only that the knife was coming down, coming down. When it plunged into his body, a cry of pain filled the air, terrible in its anguish, and at the same time there was a great rus.h.i.+ng of air down my throat into my lungs, sweet, sweet air that filled my life's crevices as his fingers loosened their hold, although I still felt their imprint on the flesh of my neck. I stabbed again and again, could not stop, did not want to stop, my own madness taking over. He clung to me for a moment and a sob escaped his lips, the sob of a child crying itself to sleep at night, then he slumped against me and rolled away.

He knew he was doomed and dying when the blade first slipped into him, before the other stabbings, reaching a place deep and vital inside of him where nothing had ever gone before. He wanted to let go, let go. The voice was telling him to hold on. But he didn't want to hold on. The h.e.l.l with the voice. Don Don V V let go. let go. I will, I will. I will, I will.

The pain, demanding and insistent, spread through his body like fire eating him up. Ma, he cried, Ma. He started to cry, opening his eyes to see if she was here but he saw only blood, a curtain of blood, his own blood. Just before he closed his eyes for the last time, giving himself up to the dark, knowing he had finally overcome the voice, he heard another voice, his mother singing to him, couldn't make out the words or the tune, her voice far away. He went toward her voice. Into the dark. Into nothing.

The boy emerged from the fade into the moonlight, slowly, in stages, his body appearing the way a film develops in a tray, my tears the liquid. His body was limp in that final fatal way of bodies after breath has gone, face slack and loose, something almost sweet in the face, in repose, as if untouched by time or pain or injury, the abused nose not repulsive now, still bruised and broken but n.o.ble somehow, like an old battle wound.

"Oh, Ozzie," I said, tasting my tears as I spoke, aware of lights coming on in the convent.

As I stood over the boy, something moved inside me, in some unknown and uncharted territory of myself, something s.h.i.+fting and letting go, deep beneath the surface. Standing there, I felt, impossible, that I was going away from myself, away from pain, away from loss. Not in the fade but gone in another way.

Good-bye, I said.

But did not hear my voice.

And did not, did not know to whom or to what I was saying good-bye.

*iction, of course.

That was the verdict Meredith and I reached by the end of my Manhattan summer. The word, in fact, became a kind of lifeline, something to clutch and hold on to.

"You have to be slightly insane to survive in the agent business," Meredith said. Then, pointing to the ma.n.u.script, she said: "But the fade would take me way beyond the pale...."

I agreed. Then.

s.h.i.+t. I must agree now. now.

Despite what I have pinned to my bulletin board here in my room, what I cannot resist reading over and over again.

Although it's November outside, it's winter here in the boardinghouse. My room is not exactly the Ritz and it's impossible to heat, but it is not a dump either. (Dorm rooms seem to be a myth at B.U. and I was lucky to find this place, from which, if I stretch at the window, I can see a patch of the Charles River.) So here I am in Boston at the typewriter writing, as Paul Roget once sat in Monument, writing. But he wrote novels and short stories and I am writing-what?

I dunno.

Trying to put my thoughts into some kind of order.

Still trying to follow Professor Waronski's dictum of getting things down on paper, between the demands of a term paper that I must start sometime if Fm to finish before the finals in December and library research I must complete for a political sei project.

The h.e.l.l with all that.

Let me go back to New York and Meredith and how we came to terms with Paul's ma.n.u.script.

For the most part, I was caught up in the frenetic world of Broome & Company, twelve-and fourteen-hour days of office activity while Meredith kept up her own frantic pace.

Days pa.s.sed when we barely conversed, when I collapsed in bed at nine-thirty while she was still at the office or out somewhere at a publication party. Or on the telephone in conversations that seemed endless, filled with the jargon of the trade.

At various times we surfaced and seemed to discover each other all over again. Returning from St. Pat's one brilliant Sunday morning, Meredith said: "Rose is the key, Susan." Bringing the subject up from out of nowhere. "If she were still alive, she could provide the answer. Did she or did she not have a baby out of wedlock?"

"Right," I said, wondering if either of us would have had the courage to ask her that question.

In the apartment one evening, after a late frozen-food dinner that we barely touched, both of us exhausted after a day of frenzy at Broome, she said: "I have something to say, Susan." In her best office voice.

Bracing myself, I merely said: "Yes."

Her fatigue suddenly gone, she looked me straight in the eye and said: "Fade."

Enunciating the word so deliberately that she almost stretched it to two syllables.

I waited for more.

"Fade/' she said again. Then: "Invisible. Unseen. Disappear."

Now she waited for my reaction, her eyes asking questions I could not comprehend.

When I still said nothing, she said: "See how impossible those words sound? Written down on paper, fine. In my thoughts or your thoughts, also fine. But yesterday, alone in the office for a moment, door closed, I said this aloud: 'Paul Roget had the power to make himself invisible.' And immediately, hearing those words come out of my mouth, I realized how impossible they sounded. Try it, Susan."

I tried it: "Paul Roget faded, became invisible, unseen-"

"See what I mean?" Meredith asked.

And I did.

On paper, between the first and last pages of a ma.n.u.script, nothing is impossible. But in the reality of suns.h.i.+ne on a carpet, furniture you can touch as you pa.s.s, faucets that spout water, headaches, loneliness on a Sunday evening, the illusions created by nouns and verbs and similes and metaphors become only that-illusions. Words on a page. And fade fade becomes, then, just another word. becomes, then, just another word.

Finally, on the subway, crowded and jostled and hanging on to the straps for dear life, she said: "I did some checking today with the help of a gal I know in the research department at Time. Time. Checked on Ramsey, Maine. Which we found does not exist. And the order of the Sisters of Mercy. Which likewise does not exist." Swayed away from me as the car swung wildly entering a station. "Checked old resort towns with dried-up springs. Again: nothing." Perhaps antic.i.p.ating my response, she said: "All of which doesn't mean that they don't exist elsewhere." Checked on Ramsey, Maine. Which we found does not exist. And the order of the Sisters of Mercy. Which likewise does not exist." Swayed away from me as the car swung wildly entering a station. "Checked old resort towns with dried-up springs. Again: nothing." Perhaps antic.i.p.ating my response, she said: "All of which doesn't mean that they don't exist elsewhere."

"Then why did he switch from a real Frenchtown to a made-up Ramsey?" I asked. "From first person with Paul to third person with Ozzie?"

"Because it's all fiction," she said. "It has to be, Susan." A kind of desperation in her voice.

"I know," I said.

We looked in each other's eyes for a long time and then looked away. As if we had called a truce there in the crowded subway car careening under the streets of Manhattan. We did not speak of the ma.n.u.script again that summer.

But that night in bed I thought of my grandfather and what he had told me one day in Monument, something I had not divulged to Meredith or even admitted to myself the day I had discovered the ma.n.u.script in her apartment.

A year ago, October, a leaf-tumbling, beautiful day, I arrived in Monument by B&M train. My grandfather met me at the depot and drove me around town, pointing out places Paul had described in his novels and stories. At one point, we pulled up in front of the public library, across from City Hall.

"Paul and I spent a lot of time there as kids," he said, indicating the ancient stone building shrouded by trees and bushes. "Paul practically lived in the place. He told me he was going to read every book in there. I wonder if he ever did." He chuckled, shaking his head. "I think he knew the library better than the librarians. I once accused him of knowing about a secret room in the building. ..."

My penchant for drama and mystery a.s.serted itself and, thrilled, I said: "Secret room?"

Voice tender with reminiscence, he said: "One year, when we were eleven or twelve, I received a detective kit for Christmas. We went to the library looking for books on detection. We sneaked into the adult stacks, practically tiptoeing around because libraries were quiet places in those days. I discovered a book on fingerprinting and went to look for Paul. I couldn't find him. Looked up, down, all over the building. It's as if he had disappeared.

"Finally, he showed up. Looked guilty as h.e.l.l, pale, almost sick. I accused him of hiding-had he found a secret spot somewhere? He said he had felt a bit sick, sat down in the stacks, curled up, and sort of fell asleep. Sounded strange to me but I let it go because he'd been having a bad year. Fainted once or twice, lost weight, had no appet.i.te. Growing pains, p.u.b.erty probably, the doctor said, and gave him all kinds of tonics. This was before the days of vitamin pills, I guess...."

At the time, the incident in the library did not make a large impression on me, and became a kind of footnote in my memory. Until that summer evening in Meredith's apartment when I read Paul's ma.n.u.script.

Why hadn't my grandfather mentioned the incident in his report to Meredith?

Had he refused to acknowledge Paul's disappearance because it would lead him to enormous conclusions that he could not accept?

Or was he keeping secrets?

Did Meredith have her own secrets?

Were we all keeping secrets from each other?

After all, I have not told Meredith about Paul's disappearance at the library, either.

Two weeks ago I visited Monument for the first time since returning from New York City and found my grandfather, weak and wan, in a bed at Monument Hospital, recovering from surgery.

"My colon," he said. "And complications/'

"What kind of complications?" I asked, appalled to see this man who had never looked like a grandfather suddenly looking like one, his graying hair no longer giving off flashes of distinction but uncombed, l.u.s.terless, his face ashen.

"They don't know yet," he said wearily. "Old age itself is a complication, Susan."

"You're not old," I said. "You could never be old."

"I'm sixty-three," he said. "But an old sixty-three, my girl. More than forty years on the force, thirty of them on night s.h.i.+fts, walking the beat before they gave me plain clothes." Sighing, closing his eyes, he said: "h.e.l.l, it was a good life."

Speaking in past tense, as if his life were also past tense.

In Boston's North End, I found an ancient church and went inside to burn a candle for him, the way his generation did in the old days. There were no candles in the church, only an array of small light bulbs in candle holders. The bulbs lit up when you inserted a coin. I placed a dollar in the poor box instead and offered a prayer before a statue of St. Jude. Jude.

I will visit my grandfather in Monument again but won't ask him any more questions about Paul.

Meredith and I keep in touch with brief notes and late-night phone calls. She has asked me, hooray, to return to Broome & Company next summer. Two days ago I received a letter from her that contained the following: "Had a long talk with Walter Holland at Harbor House yesterday. He's still interested in a Paul Roget collection and positively glowed when I told him about the new ma.n.u.script, fragmented though it is. Funny thing, Susan. As soon as I sent it off by messenger this morning, a feeling of-I don't know-peace? (no, too strong a word), accomplishment? (not exactly that either), came over me. A feeling that I had paid off a debt, as if I had completed a mission Paul wanted me to carry out. Crazy? Maybe. But a kind of sadness was lifted from me, sadness that had lingered ever since his death all those years ago."

Paul Roget died in his bed in a rented apartment on Second Street in Frenchtown on June 3, 1967, at the age of forty-two. The New York Times New York Times obituary said he died of natural causes. My grandfather told me that Paul had been the victim of a series of ailments in his final years. He had developed diabetes, lost a great deal of weight, and suffered a heart attack two years before he died. obituary said he died of natural causes. My grandfather told me that Paul had been the victim of a series of ailments in his final years. He had developed diabetes, lost a great deal of weight, and suffered a heart attack two years before he died.

He had become more of a recluse than ever in those last days, moving from apartment to apartment, refused to have a telephone installed, stopped writing (although he must have written the fade ma.n.u.script at that time). He did not always admit visitors when they knocked at his door. Although he never turned away his nephews and nieces, his enthusiasm for their company diminished and, sensing his growing indifference, they stopped visiting. My grandfather saw him at ma.s.s occasionally on Sunday but never saw him receive communion.

He seems to have faded away. Not the fade of his ma.n.u.script but fading the way the lights and colors of the day fail as night falls, as if he began to live his ma.n.u.script in a manner he could not have foreseen.

Thus, he became a fader after all.

That, I thought sadly, is the end of that.

Until.

Until five days ago, when I picked up The Boston Globe The Boston Globe and read the following story, which is what I have pinned to my bulletin board: and read the following story, which is what I have pinned to my bulletin board: MYSTERY BLAST KILLS 75:.

SECOND TRAGEDY IN WEEK.

SHERWOOD, N.Y. N.Y. (AP) (AP)- A mysterious explosion in a chemical plant here Tuesday killed 75 workers and injured 23 others in the second major tragedy to hit this city of 11,000 in a week. On Friday night, 20 students and 3 teachers died when fire swept the Sherwood High School gymnasium during the Senior Prom.The causes of the explosion and fire have not been determined. Police Chief Herman Barnaby said that "foul play is suspected in both cases.""We are baffled," admitted Henry Tewks-bury, plant manager of ABC Chemicals, Inc. "Because of the volatile nature of the chemicals, we maintain the strictest security in the world. Our experts tell us it was impossible for anyone to penetrate our security without being observed. That person would have had to be invisible."Equally "impossible," according to high school princ.i.p.al Vito Andalucci, were the circ.u.mstances in which the students and teachers died in the gymnasium. About 100 escaped the smoky blaze, but those who lost their lives were trapped in a corridor, unable to open a door leading to safety."That door was under my personal surveillance the entire evening," Princ.i.p.al Andalucci said. "This precaution was taken because last year rowdy outsiders entered the gym through that door and disrupted the prom. I vowed that would not happen this year. Impossible as it was, someone jammed the mechanism of the lock. Thus, when I sent those students and teachers off in that direction, I was sending them to their deaths."Chief Barnaby refused to comment on reports that the town had been plagued recently by acts of terror, ranging from vandalism in business places on Main Street to a series of break-ins in local homes.Meanwhile, the state fire marshal's office discounted a report that a teenager had been seen in the vicinity of the plant shortly before the explosion. One Sherwood resident, who has not been identified, said the teenager "disappeared into thin air" after being spotted near the plant's entrance."We are looking for physical evidence and cannot be involved with rumors and hearsay," Fire Chief Martin Peters said.

I sit here in my room in Boston, safe and snug, thinking of someone at this moment in upstate New York, someone who might be a new fader, another nephew in a new generation, a madman unleashed on the world.

Impossible, I tell myself, even as I wonder if I have the answer at last to the reason why Paul wanted his ma.n.u.script held back until this year or later. Did he want it to coincide with the appearance of a new fader-as a warning or a message?

I don't know the answer to that question.

Or to some other questions, either.

I mean, I sit here and I think of the fade and that clipping on the bulletin board and I wonder if I am safe and snug after all. If any of us are.