Green Eyes

  One night, a splendid windy night, I went unaccompanied onto the grounds and sat in my wheelchair atop a rise close to the house. Everything, it seemed, was streaming away from me. The wind poured in a cold, unbroken rhythm off the Gulf, the oaks tossed their shadowy crowns, and silver-edged clouds raced just beneath the moon, which was itself a disc of silver, almost full. I was the single fixed point in that night’s flowing substance. Black leaves skittered across silvery falls of moonlight, and my clothes tugged and snapped as if they wished to be rid of me. Time was going on without me, I thought, and I was becoming timeless once again. That was all the rectitude of life and death, then, this process of becoming timeless. My whole attention was focused outward upon the flow of night and wind, and I felt myself grown stern and intractable in relation to the petty scatterings of these inessential things, felt my little rise swell into a lofty prominence, and felt my flesh to be the sounding of a music, fading now, but soon to sound anew after the indrawing of an ancient breath. Dreams, you might say, fantasies, an old man’s maunderings on mystery as his second death approaches. But it is dreams which make us live, and mystery, and who is to say they will not carry us away when life is done.

  They took Laura back to Tulane under sedation. “Bye,’ she said at the door, weakly, staring into Jocundra’s eyes with puzzled intensity, as if wondering at their strange color, and then repeated, “Bye,’ looking down to the floor, saying it the way you might say a word you had just learned, trying out its odd shape in your mouth.

  Like everyone else, Jocundra assumed Laura had been in the room when Magnusson slit his throat - if such was the case: the missing scalpel permitted the possibility of alternate scenarios, though it was generally held that Laura, in her distracted state, had picked it up and mislaid it. But unlike everyone, Jocundra did not believe the violence of the death was wholly responsible for Laura’s condition. That alone could not have transformed her into this pale doll creature who was led by the elbow and helped to sit in Ezawa’s gray Cadillac, who pressed her face against the smoked glass window and gazed wanly back at the house. Her apparent callousness toward Magnusson must, Jocundra thought, have masked real feelings which had most contributed to her breakdown.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ said Edman at the staff meeting later in the day. ‘You knew there’d be some trauma.’

  But Jocundra had not known there was a potential for collapse, for derangement, and she was outraged. ‘The end will be difficult,’ a vastly paternal Edman had told her at the briefing before she left Tulane. ‘But you’ll take from it something very human and strengthening.’ And she had swallowed it! She wanted nothing more to do with lies or with Edman, who was the father of lies; she would prepare as best she could for the inevitable crash of Donnell’s ending, and afterward she would wash her hands of the project.

  For the next two weeks she intensified her commitment toward cultivating a distance between herself and Donnell, and attempted as well to create distance between herself and the project, though this did not prove easy. The atmosphere of Shadows had grown more muted and clandestine than ever. It was as if there had been a unity in the house, some league now dissolved by Magnusson’s death, and no one could be certain of the new alignments which might emerge. The therapists passed each other in the hall with averted eyes; French and Monroe hid behind their bedroom doors, and Richmond wandered by himself. The doctors broke off whispered conferences whenever anyone of lesser authority came near and withdrew to the upstairs offices. Even the ubiquitous ferns in their brass pots seemed instruments of subterfuge, their feathery fronds capable of concealing sensitive antennae. Yet despite this divisiveness, or because of it, everyone pried and eavesdropped and agitated. Once Dr Brauer pulled Jocundra aside and heaped invective upon Edman who, he said, spent most of his time on the telephone to Tulane, begging the administration to keep hands off, not to disrupt the process.

  ‘But don’t you think a disruption is necessary? Haven’t the patients been exposed to enough of Edman’s incompetence?’ When she shrugged, unwilling to join in any power struggle, he drew his sour, thin features into a measly smile and asked, ‘How’s Harrison doing?’

  ‘Frankly,’ she said, furious at his false concern, ‘I don’t care who runs this damned place, and as for Harrison, he’s dying!’