The bloodstone, p.14
The Bloodstone, page 14
Occasionally she smoked, inhaling the poison like fragrant air. Although it made her heart beat rapidly, the smoke seemed to still her thoughts until she was full of interior silence. No questions for the moment. No answers.
It was Tuesday, the 31st of March.
Another unproductive day, Chandal thought, and realized she had forgotten to call her service for two days now. She knew she should care about that and the fact that she had stopped making rounds, but the truth was she didn’t give a damn. She didn’t even care about all the bills that she had accumulated and had no way to pay. She didn’t care that the phone had been ringing incessantly every night—probably Ron—and that she had refused to answer it. Even the problem of Billy Deats seemed vague and inconsequential to her now. Strange how she had been so involved in that worry. Even to the point where she had finally written him a letter in care of Actors’ Equity with instructions to forward.
Screw Billy Deats, she thought succinctly, and pulled her trench coat tighter around her, more out of conditioning than chill. Actually, she noticed, the day was warm. Springlike. Peaceful.
Tomorrow was her final audition at the Pilot Theatre. It was the one clear focal point of her week. If she got the role, she wouldn’t have to feel she’d wasted the week. And somehow, smiling serenely, she knew the role of Rachel was hers.
In front of her, a nondescript man stooped over his shopping bags, took a tinfoil package from within, opened it and began to toss handfuls of breadcrumbs to pigeons.
Idly she watched the birds begin to flock around him. Something caught her ear, a clicking sound, and she glanced down at her hands. Stranger’s hands holding small sticks. The sticks clicked together, down, up, down, then stopped, seemed to weld together in a familiar design. A cross. She studied it thoughtfully.
A child entered the park with a German shepherd puppy on a leash. The pup, full of bounding energy, pulled free of the child’s hands, charged through the flock of feeding pigeons and ate their crumbs. Sounds of fluttering wings, the child’s shriek, the rustling of the old man’s shopping bags as he rapidly moved away, all penetrated the vacancy of Chandal’s mind.
She blinked as though she had suddenly come to life. Her eyes teared in the bright sunlight and her body pulled free with a sudden convulsive jerk. There was something bothersome in the back of her mind. A feverish urgency. She had to remember. She had to remember before it was too late. Otherwise she was in danger. She was convinced of it. Fear mounted, vibrated to a high pitch, crawled along her tongue like bitter gall.
“I’ve got to remember,” she said out loud and knew that in some way it had become vitally necessary. Otherwise she was about to lose something. One clear thought: There was more than one way to die.
”Don’t worry,” whispered the voice in her head.
“I’ve got to remember!” she insisted stubbornly. If only she could reclaim that forgotten time in her life, understand what had happened during that time, then perhaps she and Ron...
“Don’t think about it,” ordered the voice.
Chandal froze. It was the first time she was relating to the voice clearly. Whose voice was that? she was able to wonder for the first time. She could feel a tight knot of anger in her gut, but ignored it. She went on thinking: Whose voice? Mine? No, someone else’s.
She felt her hand close around the pendant. She fought it, tried to unclench her hand, but her fingers curled tighter as though she embraced a part of herself. Her fingers convulsed around the stone and then, reluctantly, relaxed. The voice continued to whisper, but now she couldn’t make out the words, couldn’t concentrate.
Billy Deats, she thought dreamily. Somehow she was convinced that Billy knew what had happened at the brownstone the night of the fire. That he would be able to fill in those lost days and weeks. He had helped Justin and her move, hadn’t he? Surely he had come to the brownstone often?
... no.”
“Yes!”
“Don’t think about it!”
“What?”
Silence.
Ron lay gasping for breath, bathed in sweat.
He awoke Saturday morning with a full-fledged case of flu. He decided through a swimming headache that he had all the symptoms—from head to stomach to throat. Not only that, he knew he had a soaring fever. Exactly what the illness was, he couldn’t be sure. His thermometer was nowhere to be found, but he knew from the alternate chills and hot flashes that his body heat was on a rampage.
Fluids, he reasoned vaguely, and managed to down a glass of orange juice before his stomach rebelled and forcibly ejected it. After that he succumbed, with patience honed by misery, to bed rest and hours of holding his head over the toilet bowl.
Sunday he was worse. One sweat-soaked, nauseated and laryngitic bundle of human flesh, still with one obstinate train of thought. At all hours he called New York. He no longer looked at the clock, just obsessively dialed the memorized number, letting it ring until he could no longer hold the phone. Then he waited to gather the strength to dial again.
On Monday he called in sick.
“Sick?” Mimi’s worried voice retorted. “You sound like you’re calling in dead!”
“Funny,” croaked Ron. “Very funny.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“I’m too sick to go to a doctor. I can’t get out the door. I’d rather die.”
“My boyfriend is a doctor. Maybe I can get him to make a house call.”
“Thanks.” Ron hesitated. “Mimi, I have to hang right up.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t time to...” He slammed the phone on the hook and raced for the john. He barely made it, not that it mattered much. There was nothing solid on his stomach, just an intangible gall that seemed to have settled at some unreachable depth within him.
On Tuesday Mimi’s boyfriend appeared, too young surely to be a practicing physician, but Ron decided he was in no position to be choosy.
“You have a fever of over 103 degrees,” the young man smiled cheerfully. “Have you been taking aspirin?”
“I’ve taken them,” Ron grunted, sinking lower into the bed. “Holding them down is something else. What have I got—flu?”
“It would seem so. Whatever brand it is, you’ve got it bad. Let me take a look at that throat. Yep, you’ve got streptococcus, on top of everything else. I can give you something for that and maybe something to bring your fever down, but you belong in the hospital.”
“No hospital,” Ron croaked firmly.
“Look at you. How long since you’ve held anything down?”
“Ah....”
“I thought so. You’re dehydrated, infected from your ears down, and the least we can do is get some glucose in you and run a few tests. I’ll be honest—I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
“No hospital.”
“You’re as stubborn as Mimi said you’d be.”
“And you—” Ron said with gloomy triumph, “don’t look anything at all like Dustin Hoffman.”
“What?”
“Just the feverish ravings of a sick man.”
“I’m giving you a penicillin injection—any reaction to penicillin? Good. And I’ll have the drugstore deliver two prescriptions. One for the infection and one for the nausea. If you’re no better in a day or two....” He frowned.
“Hospital,” agreed Ron and managed to write a check and say a civil goodbye before the next dash for the toilet.
Dehydrated, he reminded himself ten agonized minutes later and walked swaying into the kitchen for ginger ale and ice. He stared at the drink for some moments and then held it against his throat. The ever-present nausea subsided somewhat.
Still holding the cold drink against his throat, he swayed back to bed, and automatically dialed the New York number. After three rings, he was prepared to hang up when a click told him that someone had picked up on the other end.
“Hello?” he mumbled, spilling ginger ale on the sheet. “Chandal?”
“No,” said a masculine voice. “Chandal is out. Can I take a message?”
Ron paused, a wave of confusion all but covering him. “You are?” he asked too bluntly, though he didn’t care.
“The super. Mike. I can take a message.”
“Oh,” Ron answered, as if the word had pages of meaning, such as: I sure in hell am relieved you’re the super, or: Even if you are the super, get the hell out of there, or: Tell Chandal it’s Ron. Tell her it’s very important that she call me. Which was finally what he managed to say.
“Right,” said Mike’s young, energetic, healthy voice and the connection was severed.
He sounds like a good super, thought Ron bitterly. He took a sip of ginger ale and lay flat in bed as he closed his eyes. No fooling around with supers, Chandal. It’s a very cheap thing to do, especially when the man who loves you is in Los Angeles, languishing on his death bed.
He could feel his eyes closing. He remembered that he was upset about something, but exactly what he wasn’t sure. The last of the sunlight was blackened out as his heavy eyelids closed, and he fell into an unusually deep sleep as if he had descended a ladder into a very dark hole where he was a captive. Around his neck dangled a heavy object that swayed as he walked and beat against his naked chest. Without touching it, he knew what it was. An upside-down crucifix. And he knew that the anguished screaming face of Christ had once again changed.
At the foot of the steps leading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chandal hesitated, then slowly, counting the steps, followed in the wake of brisker, more purposeful visitors.
“Most of us come near it at one time or another,” Dr. Luther had said. “Sometimes only for a moment, sometimes for a day, a week—even a month.”
He had been speaking of insanity. He had gone on to quote Herman Melville: “In all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is, has but a mouthful of brains.”
Dr. Luther’s words had not been a comfort to Chandal then, just as they were not a comfort to her now. Was she, Chandal wondered, mentally ill? Was the voice she had heard, actually there? Or was it just a fragment of her overworked imagination?
She shook her head. As quietly as she could, she tried to control the confusion she felt at this moment. Everything had been moving so fast. She had to slow down. Relax. Why was she pushing herself so hard? As if her very life depended on it.
Dr. Luther had explained it all very clearly. “Amnesia may obscure little or much or even the whole of memory. In your case,” he had added with a smile, “it’s little, and I’m sure that the missing segment of time you are experiencing will return to you spontaneously, when you least expect it, at a party, while walking down the street, in the shower, and that you will return to fully functioning consciousness.”
Yet there was something about it that didn’t make sense. If Dr. Luther was so sure she was going to be all right, why had he cautioned her not to return to New York? And why did she feel she needed to be forgiven? Why did words like blameless and unjudgeable keep recurring in her mind? Had the fire been her fault? Was that it?
Chandal frowned. A circus act, that’s what it was. Like tightrope walking between the towers of the World Trade Center. The higher you go—the more they pay. The more they wait for you to fall.
Stuck now with her present hit-or-miss thinking—no time, really, to put the pieces together—she punched her way through the door. Inside, she stopped to make a contribution. She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d given, but the man looked at her oddly before shoving across a patron button which she affixed to her collar with fingers that trembled slightly.
She let herself wander, stopped to stare searchingly at a vast urn, intricately molded into hundreds of faces and human figures, all entwined, some chipped, with heads missing, bodies incomplete. She shivered and moved on. Statues, vases, jewelry. She stared down at an exotically painted mummy and wondered who he was. What man was this who had lived and loved and had thoughts privately and distinctly his own?
She wandered on with no sense of direction or purpose. Through an English square, around an Egyptian temple, now silent, deserted, where once worshipers had assembled at the first Christian church in Egypt.
“Chandal?” shrilled a voice from behind her right shoulder. “Here you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Turning, Chandal was dragged from Egyptian history to American contemporary art. “Doreen,” she murmured, glancing at the guard who stared in their direction, “what are you doing here?”
“We had an appointment to meet, remember?” Doreen’s voice was still high and rather nervous, as though she were ill at ease in such a cultural setting.
“I... I must have forgotten,” Chandal breathed, trying to indicate by her own example that a lower voice level was desirable.
“What’s this place?” Doreen relaxed slightly and dropped onto a marble ledge to view the ruin. “It looks boring as hell, doesn’t it?” She giggled and covered her mouth with both hands. “Look at that, there are stones missing, even. You’d think they’d make some copies, wouldn’t you—fill it in a little.”
Chandal smiled and continued to stare at Doreen. She could feel a bit of normality return, but still had no recollection that she had made an appointment to meet with Doreen that day. For that matter, she had no awareness of conscious decision to come to the museum. She had merely found herself in front of it as though by a wizard’s magic. She shrugged. “Come on. Let’s go look at the paintings.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“I meant right now,” Chandal said as Doreen continued to stare in a bemused sort of way at the ancient temple.
“Okay. I was just trying to imagine why they have a guard in this room. What is there to steal?”
“Maybe they’re afraid that people would chip off souvenirs. Or maybe paint it.”
“You mean grafitti?” Doreen giggled.
“Or someone could hide in the temple,” Chandal realized suddenly. “During museum hours, you know, and then later, after everyone had gone...”
“Geez, you’d make a terrific thief,” Doreen decided. She briskly gathered up her purse, and proceeded swiftly and competently to the exit. “Now which way?”
“I’d like to see the American Wing.”
“No.” Doreen immediately spun in the opposite direction. “Let’s go upstairs first. Up that big staircase. What’s up there?”
“Paintings.”
“Oh, good. I’m going to get cultured.”
Side by side they hurried up the stairway, delivered from the scrutiny of one set of guards’ eyes into the observation of another set. Scarcely had they entered the first of many rooms, when Doreen asked: “Who do you like the best?”
“Rembrandt. He’s always been my favorite. Look, here are his wife and his mistress as he painted them. Hanging right next to each other. I wonder if either of them conform to that day’s standard of beauty?”
“I don’t know.” Doreen turned abruptly away and darted into the next room.
Chandal followed more slowly, caught up in a great sense of history, of universal memory, where images had been frozen and framed by the mysterious minds of its artists. Uncharted time and space left for others to decipher.
She wandered through the doorway and came upon Doreen, who stood at the base of a large painting of a girl, gazing at it with rapt attention. The artist was unknown, Chandal noted, and she felt sorry that he had lost recognition for this work. She found it a compelling portrait and noted the youth of the girl and the broken window over her shoulder—indicative, the plaque explained, of an unhappy love affair.
“She lost something too,” Doreen said suddenly. “Just like me.
“What did you lose?” asked Chandal, rather startled at the comparison between this pale dreamy girl of centuries ago and Doreen, who was bright, contemporary and, more than anything else, vibrantly alive.
“Mike. I lost—I think I’ve lost Mike.”
“No. God, no. It couldn’t be.”
“He’s in love with someone else.”
“Who on earth is he in love with?” gasped Chandal.
Doreen continued to gaze in a fixed way at the portrait.
“Doreen? Who do you think...?”
“I think he’s in love with you,” breathed Doreen, still refusing to look at Chandal.
“Mike? Doreen, no. You can’t think that.”
“Can’t I?” she asked bitterly. “It’s true. Do you know that sometimes Mike stares out of the window for hours, just trying to catch sight of you. Oh, I know,” she added on a softer note, “that you don’t have anything to do with it. Although...”
“Although what?” asked Chandal sharply.
“Although he is so handsome, don’t you think? I always thought he was the most handsome man I ever looked at.” Doreen’s eyes were wistful.
Abruptly something flashed into Chandal’s mind. A half-forgotten thought that Doreen and Mike were a very strange combination. Despite his deformity, Mike was dramatically handsome and without a doubt very appealing to women. And there was a strange power about him, sensuous and compelling, a power that any woman would find fascinating. Doreen, on the other hand, was the plump, jolly, not-very-pretty type.
Chandal hurriedly put such a disloyal comparison away and linked her arm through Doreen’s. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, “because believe me, I would never...”
“I know.” Doreen brightened. “I’m sorry I even mentioned it. Maybe I’m just paranoid on the subject of Mike. Forget I mentioned it, okay? Geez, I don’t know how I could have said that to you.”
They wandered on into various rooms, then down a hallway of glass cases containing ancient jewelry, urns, fans and other articles of a vanished age. Doreen continued to chatter as they made their way, still arm and arm, down the long stairway. Chandal’s attention wandered. The old nagging syndrome. Her constant effort to remember, remember. She could not escape its power when it pulled as hard as it did at this moment. She could feel herself start to tremble as they came to the lower level and faced the exit door.
