Prelude to a Scream Read online

  “Goddamn, what the hell am I doing,” said Jasper, “gittin’ my ass wet first thing.”

  Stanley turned his head. Jasper had eased a flattened cardboard twelve-pack carton beneath a remnant of the pile of excrement, which he now flipped away. Thus the scraping sound. Stanley realized he must have been asleep for only a couple of minutes. Perhaps unconscious was a better term.

  “How in the hell a man got in here to squat and didn’t shit on your face is beyond me,” Jasper growled, wrinkling his nose. “A contortionist. Goddamn genius.” He scraped cypress needles and dirt in the direction of the feces and flipped the cardboard after it. “Okay, Stanley, pard. Jist act like a drowning man and float along with the flow of things. Don’t grab me by the neck or I’ll kill ya.”

  Jasper showed Stanley the fat blade of an open clasp knife, about four inches long with a little picture of it cutting through the shank of a steel bolt stamped on the handle.

  Stanley said nothing. The knife disappeared.

  Jasper reached between the ground and the low cypress limbs, grabbed a fistful of the sleeping bag at Stanley’s shoulder, and began to back out from under the tree, pulling Stanley after him, bag and all.

  Stanley gritted his teeth, and used his good arm in an attempt to keep the painful location in his lower back from bouncing over the ground, but the exposed knuckle of a cypress root gouged him pretty accurately. The pain seared his hangover as definitively as the contrail of a jet chalks a cloudless sky.

  Beyond the protective limbs of the cypress tree the grass was wet, and a spray of water doused both Stanley and Jasper as the latter pulled the former into the sunlight. Jasper didn’t stop dragging Stanley until he’d slid him over the wet grass and clear of the cyclic plume of irrigation water, thirty or forty yards beyond the tree, into a small grove of eucalyptus.

  The pain was more than Stanley had experienced in a long time. He could hear Jasper yelling, cursing the water, but it seemed that he was very far away. Just before he passed out, he recognized the roof of the Department of Motor Vehicles building beyond Baker Street, scene of perennial ignominy. So they were in the easternmost tip of the Panhandle.

  Then Jasper’s face was very close, but his voice was very far away. He could hear Jasper calling his name, asking about blood on the sleeping bag, the first Stanley had heard about it. Stanley tried to localize the pain he was feeling, but waves of something else isolated him from it, each more diminished than the last as they flooded through his system. He found himself in a dwelling all too familiar to him, an apartment from another time, belonging to a woman he’d known. Its Victorian rooms featured high, coved ceilings, crown molding, plaster walls, chair-rail, wainscot, baseboards and hardwood floor. The source of his pain was throbbing secretly in that apartment. A wall stood between him and that pain, a kind of buffer absorbing energy from both himself and the source of the pain. There was a door in the wall but it kept shifting around. When he went to close it against the pain it would dematerialize in front of him and rematerialize behind him, still open, beaming the pain directly at that place in his back. Realizing this, he turned and caught a glimpse of something glowing powerfully beyond the door. To partially shield himself against the beam of pain, he grasped at the door’s handle while he searched this familiar hallway for that other door, the exit that would allow him to escape. Or maybe, if he was really clever, maybe he could move on down this hall and find Her waiting there. Vivienne? He didn’t know a Vivienne. But for some reason he knew the name. The light was a pale bluish-gray. But now, yet another door was opening behind him and hands were pointing at his back. He tried to twist around to confront them because, after all, this was his back disembodied voices were now discussing as if it were the scene of a crime that happened just last week on the sidewalk in front of the local grocery where you could still see the stains. But the scrutiny hurt. And even while holding eyeballs hands shouldn’t hurt like that — well you know, the scrutinies of some eyes do hurt like that. So he turned back the other way and was blinded by very bright lights. He tried to shield his face from them and, strangely enough, a very minor but nonetheless real pain spoke from the inside of his elbow, briefly dimming all other considerations. A tiny door in his elbow. And he looked up in wonder only to discover the very beautiful and caring gray eyes of Mary, a woman he’d lived with for three years and whom he may have loved although of course he’d only supposed that possibility about six months after she’d given up trying to convince him it was so and left with a stockbroker who could afford to take her to restaurants where you could be calm and well-served and take the time to figure out how you felt about almost anything, let alone Mary, of the red hair and gray eyes. Even now, nearly six years later, Stanley’s heart knew its way down that hallway, between the bedroom on one side, her studio on the other, in the apartment he and Mary had occupied at the peak of their conjunction, even as it began to change into something else, someplace else, and the vision of Mary herself with the most pleased, affectionate, expectant, welcoming, embracing expression in her eyes walked right through him and into the arms of a mist behind him, but he could not see that mist loosely defined in the Dream Computer as Her Other — her Not Stanley — and, to ice the dream’s service to him, he heard her voice. Teasing, full of laughter, pitched high with the strain of living with such a loser as himself, saying, “Goodbye, Stanley,” as in, “You blew it, Stanley,” as in, “Ciao, Stanley,” “Don’t forget what we had, Stanley,” and “Don’t forget till it hurts you like it used to hurt me,” and certainly “Don’t forget till it hurts and until long after I’ve forgotten you almost completely except for the bitter conception I will eventually conceive that I wasted three years on you and your indecisiveness,” not that she would ever think such things as “limbs like these will never be the same, with or without such as Vivienne, Stanley,” or, “Stanley, I’m buried alive with my kids in a suburb where hope can’t follow…”

  A Short, Expensive Stay In The Hospital

  Chapter Five

  HE WAS AWAKE IN A WHITE ROOM. THERE WERE A LIGHT ON THE ceiling, a window in one wall, a door in another. High up on a third wall facing the bed a television perched on an articulated arm and displayed a Roadrunner cartoon in color. All its action zipped left or right, mostly right, or up and down, mostly down, a Cartesian mayhem, mercifully soundless.

  There was a man in white with the tubes of a stethoscope and a single gold pen sticking out of the breast pocket of a white smock. He examined a clipboard. From time to time he retrieved the gold pen, made it click, wrote something with it on the clipboard. Replacing the pen, he absentmindedly missed the pocket once, twice, thrice. Each time he missed the pocket he drew a blue line down the front of it, until, the repetitive loop attracting his attention, he got it right. A minute later, retrieving the pen, clicking it, he was annoyed to find it wouldn’t write until he clicked it a second time. Having written something, he repeated the attempts to pocket the pen again. At first Stanley, whose eyes had been roving about the purlieus of his third environment in as many bouts of consciousness, thought the man must be performing this act for his, Stanley’s, amusement.

  Then he decided it was a phase problem. He watched in fascination as blue lines intermittently flared down the front of the white smock, until he passed out.

  Later, revived, Stanley lay flat on his back. He was in a hospital bed. Tubes entered his body at his nose, his right wrist and elbow, his penis. It took him awhile to ascertain this by moving and experiencing not pain but disconcerting tugs at disconcerting parts of his disconcerted anatomy. His penis, for example, felt vague and far away, yet confident and sheltered, as if it were merely upended in an umbrella stand behind a door. The pains he’d been experiencing when awake under the cypress tree were still with him but seemed manageable, buffered as they were by morphine, or perhaps Demerol, the effects of which he recognized. The pain existed at a distance; his nerves flashed him irregular word of it, like a sharp bit of light caught by a roofto
p mirror a couple of blocks away.

  The door to the hallway opened and admitted a nurse in a crisp uniform. The little white hat atop the heap of her brunette hair looked to Stanley like a distant sail on a moonlit Indian Ocean. She had violet eyes, open and frank behind the Spanish combs of their lashes, and a pale, hothouse skin without visible blemish. The blue nameplate pinned to her breast reminded Stanley of a sign he had once seen above tree line on the pristine slope of an eastern approach to the Sierra Madre, nearly buried in a winter’s good snowpack, which read, “Road Closed, September 15 to May 15.” He couldn’t see them, but he just knew it: little, white, practical shoes. Why did that remind him of something?

  “Hi,” he said joyfully.

  She had been about to hand a large envelope to the guy with the clipboard, and he had been about to take it from her. They paused over this exchange to look at him.

  “You’re back,” she said, with a smile that looked like she cared. The movement of her eyes reduced the rest of the world to chador.

  “Yes,” said Stanley, with reckless enthusiasm. “I’m back, and I’m glad. Before I leave again,” he extended his hand, “Stanley’s the name. I didn’t catch yours?” Next to the bed a wheeled stainless steel rack bearing plastic inverted sacks of translucent fluids clattered and followed his eager gesture.

  The man in white watched Stanley over the rims of his spectacles a moment, then removed the slim gold pen from the pocket of his frock and made it click.

  “General feeling of well-being despite mitigating traumas indicates untoward affinity for morphine,” he darkly muttered, re-clicking the pen to make a note on his clipboard. He silently reread what he’d written as he stabbed the pen down the front of his coat, a blue line following its tip.

  Though his own glad-handing gestures surprised him as much as anyone else in the room, this remark about mitigating traumas puzzled Stanley. Where had he heard that before?

  The beauty next to the bed laughed and said, “Iris. This is your surgeon, Doctor Sims.” Her laugh reminded Stanley of the bells of a herd of sheep following their Basque shepherd home through a mesquite grove in August, high in the Ruby Mountains of eastern Nevada, just before twilight: precisely.

  She handed the large envelope to Doctor Sims and sat on the edge of the bed, gently taking Stanley’s hand into hers.

  “I feel better already. Can I go home now?”

  She laughed.

  “Where am I? Why am I where am I?”

  “Oh.” Her expression changed to one of concern. “You don’t know?”

  “No. Should I?”

  A mere few thin layers of cotton cloth separated his hip from hers. She nestled his palm on her knee and covered it with one of her hands while she stroked the back of his wrist with the other. Thoroughly enchanted by her consternation, Stanley almost didn’t care what was wrong with him.

  Dr. Sims pulled a sheaf of X-rays out of the large envelope.

  “How does it feel?” nurse Iris asked softly, stroking Stanley’s hand.

  “Like my first date,” Stanley said.

  Her blush looked like alpenglow on a west-facing slope.

  “I mean your lower back,” she said. “How does your lower back feel?”

  Stanley smiled and repeated stupidly, “My lower back? What about my lower back?”

  Iris glanced beseechingly over her shoulder toward her superior. But this individual’s back was turned. One by one, he studiously held X-rays up to the window.

  Stanley, for his part, marveled at the way her dark hair metamorphosed to a fine, invisible down as it progressed from her temple to her cheek. Never before had such a lovely neck betrayed to him the delicate architectonics of vulnerability. It would develop, he was sure, that little bumps would arise all along the flesh of her forearm, were he merely to draw his forefinger, just its tip, along the well-defined tendon that stretched from the lobe of her lovely ear to the hollow of her throat.

  When she abruptly turned back to him, a certain resolve had taken command of her features. But when she saw him staring at her, she blushed and squeezed his hand.

  “Stanley,” she said, “Would you do something for me?”

  “Absolutely anything.”

  “Place the palm of your right hand flat against your lower back, to the right of your spine, just above your hip.”

  “Over my kidney, you mean?”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. Finally she said, “Yes, Stanley. Place your hand over your… kidney.”

  She watched him. He released her hand and gingerly worked his arm beneath the covers, sliding his hand down along his ribs. He hadn’t realized until now that he wore one of those hospital nighties that covers the anterior of the patient but leaves the posterior exposed; but it made it easy for him to discover the rows of knotted sutures that curved like a narrow-gauge railroad across his back for several inches, through the valley above the escarpment of his hip, to an abrupt terminus just below his twelfth rib, pinching together as it went the puckered fold of a long, numb incision he hadn’t known was there.

  Iris saw his expression elide from morphined eroticism to curiosity to fascination to puzzlement to concern to confusion to befuddled inquiry, directed back at her, and, finally, horror. It was like watching time-lapsed film of a rotting apple.

  “Somebody’s done cut on me,” Stanley surmised.

  Iris suppressed an odd smile. “Yes. You’re… scarred.”

  “Have I… been in an accident?”

  Iris appeared uncertain of the answer to that one.

  Nor did Stanley have enough morphine in his system to check the sudden, fearful interrogative, Who’s paying for this?

  The hall door opened a few inches. A man wrapped his neck around the door stile to look inside, saw Stanley, then Iris, then the man with the X-rays. He opened the door just enough to allow himself the slot necessary to slip quietly into the room. The man was tall, with a moustache under a big nose and a corona of badly combed sandy hair surrounding a bald spot. Dandruff sprinkled the shoulders of his brown jacket like powdered sugar on pigeon pie. He was chewing gum. He wore brown slacks that didn’t match the jacket and thick-soled brogans and his jacket was buttoned once, as low down as possible, causing it to flare unreasonably over the gun on his left hip.

  A cop. A cowardly panic momentarily swept Stanley’s other cares aside. Had he been driving when his accident happened? Had he been drunk? Had he wrecked Hop Toy’s truck? Had he killed somebody?

  Say nothing, he immediately decided. Don’t tell this guy a goddamn thing.

  Iris ignored the movement behind her, perhaps she didn’t even hear it, and chewed her lower lip. “In a manner of speaking, Stanley,” she said, “Yes. You’ve had an accident.”

  “I don’t remember any accident.”

  The cop watched him with clear pale eyes.

  Iris nodded. “That’s probably just as well.”

  The cop asked, “What do you remember?”

  “Who are you?” Stanley innocently asked.

  “Inspector Corrigan, SFPD.” He flashed a badge that for all anybody saw of it might have been the lid from a can of asparagus.

  Stanley didn’t even think about his answer. “It’s not fun, trying to remember the last thing I can’t remember. I tried and found nothing. Although my mother’s maiden name came to mind…”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “Smith.” Corrigan probably knew that already. Stanley’s fingerprints weren’t exactly a secret. At this thought, he looked at his fingertips and turned them over. They hadn’t been inked, but that’s not the way it’s done anymore. There’s this scanner, now, plugged into a computer. You just lay your hand flat on a glass plate and relax while the computer memorizes the entire intimate thing.

  “Smith. Okay.”

  “The birth was difficult. Flash forward forty-seven years, to a juniper in Golden Gate Park. Sounds of traffic. I heard a construction project, a crow calling. There was a gent by the name of Ja
sper sleeping nearby. He pulled me out from under the tree. It hurt like hell. I’d like to thank him anyway. I remember an irrigation sprinkler, too.”

  Annoyed, the cop sighed. “Nothing else? Say, three or four days before that?”

  “Nothing. Let’s see. I went to work on Friday. I goofed off all week. Stayed home. Watch movies on TV. I—.”

  “What movies?”

  “Several. All of the Star Treks.”

  “Of course,” said Iris brightly.

  “It was a festival thing. That’s the last I remember. Have I had an accident or not?”

  “You could say that.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Wait a minute. You mean something corny, like an accident of fate?”

  The cop frowned. No jokes for Corrigan.

  Then again, Stanley bitterly noted, the joke wasn’t on Corrigan.

  Iris clasped his hand to her thigh and stared earnestly into his eyes.

  The joke is on Ahearn, and it’s not funny. But this is one firm thigh beneath this thin layer of cloth. No slip. A stocking, of a material distinct from that of the skirt. It has a certain mesh to it. Then smooth muscular flesh. She frequents a gymnasium; she climbs the Stairs to Nowhere three nights a week: less often than Stanley descends them… So, despite an Accident of Fate, Stanley is alive, this gymnastic thigh tells him so. To hell with Fate. Stanley is alive and receiving sentient messages via the umbrella stand in the corner.

  He pressed the thigh gently.

  Her lips slightly parted. But she did not resist.

  She knows how to bring them back from the brink, this nurse. Yes, I’m alive, Stanley thought, and he felt something like an electric current course suddenly into him, straight into the palm of his hand, like a yo-yo snapping back after rocking the cradle.