Joyce Carol Oates - In Shock

Woke in the ambulance

Didn't know what had hit me, and woke in the speeding ambulance

Speaking of the accident (as she would afterward call it, when she spoke of it at all) she intended to give, to friends, an account of her own folly. How impulsive she was. Yet brave. Yet reckless. Woke in the ambulance and the first thing I asked, Am I still alive?

Rachael her name was spelled in the old way RACHAEL.

Rachael this was a sign (she'd so interpreted it, since girlhood) of belonging to another, more significant time.

Rachael she was not a girl any longer. A woman who'd behaved, in an emergency, without due caution.

But the boy was hurt! I had to help him.

Yes. There was a boy!

What relief, to get outside! After the storm.

She'd walked on Pine Ridge Road in the breathless aftermath of pelting rain, gale-force winds. Oh, but Rachael felt good, outdoors after that long thunderous night! Her breath steamed. For mid-April, it was damned cold. But blindingly bright. The storm had been blown away. The sun, pale and opalescent, looked to have been washed clean. Everywhere were puddles glaring with light like broken pieces of mirror. The road was strewn with storm debris. Fallen limbs of trees, enormous branches, an uprooted, aged pine. A heavy pine bough had crushed a neighbor's mailbox. Tree branches were twined in telephone lines that drooped as in a surreal work of art. Beside the road high tension wires hung loose, crackling dangerously, giving off visible sparks. Rachael heard a warning sound as of a hive of maddened wasps.

In the night she'd heard the Harpie-cries. Spirits of storm that carry souls to Hades.

Hiking now in the center of the road, where there were fewer puddles. This was a semi-rural, semi-suburban neighborhood built on a densely wooded glacial ridge above a city of forty thousand inhabitants, in eastern Pennsylvania. Most of the houses on Pine Ridge Road were small mansions originally built by railroad and mining executives in the early decades of the twentieth century; made of sandstone, or limestone, or brick-and-stucco, or granite. Some of these old houses were in immaculate condition; others were weatherworn and grimy, with peeling paint, rotting shutters and roofs, overgrown shrubbery and scrawny evergreens. The part-timbered Tudor house belonging to Rachael's parents was neither in immaculate condition nor was it a neighborhood eyesore, but its leaky roof did need repair and its living room fireplace had been a kind of inverted fountain during the storm, spewing sooty rainwater out onto the floor. Rachael had been alone in the house, up from Philadelphia for the weekend. Her parents, retired, lived in Florida. They were reluctant to sell the house, which had been built in 1911 by Rachael's father's grandfather, and Rachael hadn't pushed them, though the high property tax had become her burden. As a portion of her parents' expenses, in their retirement village in Coral Gables, had become her burden. One by one the elegant old houses of Pine Ridge were being sold to developers to be ignominiously razed and replaced by smaller houses or condominiums. It was only a matter of time before the De Long house was sold, too. Rachael knew. She wasn't a sentimental person. But to sell the house would be to break forever with the past and Rachael wasn't ready for that, yet.

For once the past is gone it's gone. Time seemed to her a sickle-shaped shadow like that caused by a lunar eclipse, swiftly passing over the earth's surface, over the startled faces of observers, no sooner glimpsed than gone.

Suddenly she was hearing a noise behind her, in the roadway. She'd been approaching the cul-de-sac of Pine Ridge Road where pines grew in profusion on a steep, rocky hill and no houses had ever been built, thinking it strange that no one else was out on this bright, blazing Sunday morning after an exhausting storm) hearing then a sound of movement behind her, and turning in surprise to see a boy on a shiny bicycle, pedaling furiously. The boy was no more than ten years old, with a pale, plumpish face and jaws set in a look of adult aggression. He'd come out of nowhere. He ignored Rachael, who had to step aside. Glassy blue eyes flicking toward Rachael and in the same instant away, as if she were of absolutely no significance to him though he'd nearly run her down. He was wearing a windbreaker with a hood, and his hands were bare. He pedaled his bicycle hunched over as if racing.

A cruel, crude face. In a child.

Rachael paused in the road, staring after the boy. Where was he going? The road dead-ended within a few hundred feet. How could parents allow a child so young to be riding a bicycle on this road, in such conditions? The boy was weaving his bicycle skillfully around tree debris, making a game of it, sharply turning his front wheel from side to side, now standing up on the pedals, shaking his handlebars as you might shake the reins of a horse, and crashing through less substantial branches in a flutter of wet leaves not seeming to mind if the new, shiny bicycle was getting scratched, or twigs were catching in the spokes. That face. But not familiar. Where? Rachael saw in horror that the boy was propelling his bicycle directly toward one of the loose wires that lay partly in the road, drooping down from a pole like a broken-backed snake. Before she could scream a warning, the front wheel of the bicycle ran over the wire, and immediately the rear wheel, she heard an outcry like that of an injured animal, and in the next instant both the boy and the bicycle fell over, skidding on the roadway; the shiny-spoked wheels were spinning.

"Are you hurt? Oh my God --"

Rachael was crouching beside the boy, seeing his face had gone deathly white and his eyes had rolled back into his head. Had he stopped breathing? The broken wire, tangled in the front wheel of the bicycle, was making a high thrumming-buzzing sound. Not thinking of the risk to herself, Rachael tried to dislodge the boy from beneath the bicycle, in so doing leaned against the bicycle, and in that instant she was knocked backward as if she'd been struck, out of nowhere, a blow like a fiery comet.

IN HADES, the spirits of the dead have no speech and are blind and groping and of no more substance than sooty smoke. Your hand passes through them. If you try to embrace them, you embrace only air. Only by sipping blood can they simulate life, but only for a brief while. Then they fade away. The spirits of the dead not fully dead. But never again to be alive.

Didn't know what hit woke in the ambulance

Her mouth stiff as if she'd had a stroke. (Had she had a stroke?) Asking am I alive am I still alive? For she'd believed she must be dead. Or (this seemed quite logical at the time, though clearly it was a mad speculation) what had been Rachael had somehow been dislodged and jolted into another body, into another brain that didn't operate as Rachael's did. So, speaking, she could not shape the words she wished. These were stones too large for her mouth. Her tongue was too long for her mouth. The wailing siren was confused with the storm. Was it still night, and still the storm? She'd been standing at an upstairs window of the darkened old house as rain lashed furiously at the windowpane. She'd been headstrong as her parents used to scold her, with affection, and her former husband had scolded; she was impetuous, stubborn, unyielding without affection, standing at a window watching lightning, the night sky vividly illuminated by lightning like suddenly irradiated veins. Oh but her heart beat quickly, as thunder broke in deafening peals about her head! I love to be alone. I love my aloneness. And the next minute strapped onto a stretcher. Punishment for being headstrong, standing at a window during a thunderstorm, and alone.

Beside her crouching Charon the boatman with his fiery eyes.

Rachael her name was spelled in the old way R A C H A E L.

Rachael she'd lost the baby at three months, two weeks and one day. She'd been a young woman in her mid-twenties at the time. A decade ago. She'd ceased grieving long ago. She was a poet and a translator and she traveled a good deal and she'd ceased grieving for what was lost, and irretrievable, as she'd ceased being a woman, a wife, a mother-to-be. The man who'd been her husband at that time and the baby's father had meant to console her. Darling look as the doctor has said it's possibly for the best nature spontaneously abhors her errors And Rachael laughed saying Aborts, you mean aborts her errors and her husband was offended by Rachael's laughter and by her tone of voice. Aborts isn't that what I said, nature spontaneously aborts her errors And Rachael asked calmly why is nature her why is nature she

The man who'd been her husband backed away. That look of revulsion in his eyes. Your grief is seeking someone to blame you are an angry woman

But Rachael was not an angry woman. Not was she a morbidly grieving woman. She'd ceased dreaming of the lost baby, long ago. She remembered no dreams.

Am I am I alive? Hot knowing who this person was. Gripping her limp icy hand. There was kindness proffered here. But was this a person, exactly. Her eyesight was blurred, she seemed to be squinting through steam. A shape in white, where the face should have been there was only gauzy light like the moon. Am I? Is this -- alive? The medic (she would realize afterward who it was) had tried to answer her. He'd seemed to know what her garbled frightened words were. He'd tried to console her. Calling her ma 'am, that was all she would remember clearly. Ma'am he'd maybe said you're going to the hospital. Plausible to imagine he'd said Ma'am you're going to be all right just lie still. She'd been taken by ambulance to a hospital long ago in another city hemorrhaging from between her legs. This time, it seemed she'd been struck by lightning having stood recklessly at a window, in an electric storm? In the old Tudor house on Pine Ridge Road where no one now lived? The lights that had been flickering had gone out suddenly. In darkness she'd made her careful way downstairs, and in a denser darkness she'd groped her way into the kitchen, to get a flashlight from a drawer. And candles: she'd lighted candles to read by. It would be difficult to sleep, that night. She'd tried to work (often, Rachael worked through the night, under ordinary circumstances) but the candlelight generated strange slanted shadows from her own hand onto the paper. She was translating Virgil, that book of the Aeneid in which Aeneas, guided by the Sibyl, visits the Underworld. Virgil's Latin seemed to the translator chill and unyielding as stone. Stones in her mouth. Stones she must suck, her only nourishment. This Underworld, sunk in feculent darkness. Monster-shapes abided there that were yet mere phantoms to be dispersed as empty air, if, like Aeneas, you had the power to dispel them. The souls of the unborn crowding near. Like the milling confusion of a subway platform in rush hour, if the lights had gone out. Infants wailing to be born who'd never been born, and would never now be born. They'd lost their chance forever.

Yes, Rachael was alive.

They smiled, assuring her. Telling her such good news.

She'd been admitted to an emergency room. She'd wakened fully, but confused, with a pounding headache. Her eyes felt to her like burst egg yolks. She was lying on a gurney, trying to sit up to protest, she wasn't hurt, why was she here? Feeling as if she'd been lifted twenty feet above the earth and let go.

Her crotch was damp, where pee had leaked in panicked dribbles out of her, at the time of her collapse. Embarrassing, before strangers.

"But -- what happened to me?"

She was told what astonished her, yet made immediate sense: she'd suffered a severe shock when apparently she'd touched a live, broken electrical wire in the road near her house; she'd been knocked unconscious. Luckily for her, the shock hadn't been strong enough to kill her. Luckily for her, a neighbor had discovered her and called an ambulance. It was sheerly luck, too, that telephones were working on Pine Ridge Road and that an ambulance had been able to make its way through the storm debris in the city, to get to her in time.

In time. Rachael was listening anxiously, and with respect.

She would have time to ponder afterward what the terse expression in time meant.

"I nearly died, then? Oh God."

An older doctor came to speak with her briefly. She listened to his voice that came to her from a distance, as if over a poor telephone line. Words carefully chosen and reasonable yet unwieldy as small stones being pushed through a viscous liquid. Rachael knew that something was wrong. Something was missing. What?

A nurse had given her a codeine tablet, still her head pounded with pain. She heard herself ask, almost inaudibly, "The boy, is he -- ? Is he all right, too?"

The doctor asked her to repeat her question, which Rachael did.

"Boy? What boy?"

Rachael said, uncertainly, "A boy on a bicycle.... He'd been knocked out by the wire, too."

The doctor shook his head. "There was no boy brought into emergency."

"They didn't just leave him there, did they? I think he was badly hurt. I was afraid he'd stopped breathing...."

"Where was this boy, exactly?"

"Where I was! On Pine Ridge Road. Where the ambulance attendants found me."

"But there doesn't seem to have been a boy. I can check our records...."

"Of course there was a boy! About ten years old, riding a bicycle. I don't know many people in the neighborhood anymore, I didn't recognize him. He must have run over a broken wire and was shocked and fell and I went to help him, that's why I...was hurt. I must have touched the wire trying to help him."

Out of Rachael's earshot there was a consultation. She was sitting up now on the gurney. She was becoming agitated. An attendant from the emergency crew was summoned to speak with her and he too insisted there'd been no boy -- "Only you, ma'am. In the road."

Rachael said, "But what happened to him? He was just a little boy. He couldn't have gotten up and walked away!"

"Ma'am, we didn't see any boy. Maybe he did just walk away?"

"No! Damn it, he was hurt. He was unconscious. His lips were blue. I was afraid he'd stopped breathing."

This was met with respectful silence.

Rachael said, pleading, "Why won't you tell me what happened to him? I don't understand this."

"Ma'am, don't excite yourself. We'll take care of it. We'll check out there on Pine Ridge, and see."

Rachael said, trying to remain calm, "He was a boy of about ten. He'd ridden his bicycle over a fallen, live wire, and collapsed...and I tried to help him. That's all I remember." Her voice trailed off into silence. Suddenly, she was exhausted. Like a swimmer who has struggled to shore, reaching now for another's outstretched hand but too weak to take hold of it, to save herself.

WARNING SYMPTOMS FOLLOWING TRAUMA prolonged headache/neckache prolonged nausea/vomiting dizziness/vertigo rapid/erratic heartbeat sleeplessness depression/mood shifts lack of appetite difficulty in concentrating difficulty in seeing pupil of one eye larger than the other

If one or more of these symptoms are experienced by the patient within five days of trauma, contact a physician immediately.

She lay still while the electrocardiogram was administered by a nurse. Her heart had ceased beating for a few seconds as she'd lain helpless on the road unaware of the road or of her misbehaving heart but now (Rachael was certain) she was fully recovered, and her heart calmly beating at the core of her body had no secrets to reveal. The boy? The boy died. That's why they were lying. Something to do with malpractice. Unless the boy recovered. Walked away and left her. Rode away on his bicycle, as a boy would. Forgot her, as a child might. Maybe the boy had played a prank? Ran Rachael down on his bicycle? The boy with the cruel, crude face. A dog-boy, those jaws. Those eyes. But no: a child so young, an innocent. What had they done with his body?

The nurse was standing over Rachael, with a look of concern.

"Miss De Long? I'm going to run this test again."

And so she did, and Rachael was informed that her heart showed no abnormalities, and she said, politely, "I didn't think it did. But thank you."

Nature abhors, aborts her errors. You must see it's for the best.

Rachael was not a woman given to morbid brooding, she saw the logic of optimism.

There was her ex-husband L--. This man who'd devoured her heart. Approaching her as in panicked fury she stammered, "You! Get away from me! I don't know you! Why are you here! Don't touch me."

She was calm enough to make a telephone call. In one of the waiting interims between tests. Telling friends in Philadelphia she'd be late for a dinner they'd planned, possibly she wouldn't make the evening at all, she was so sorry. When her friends asked what was wrong Rachael said with the cheerful evasiveness that was Rachael's usual style that it was nothing, her car seemed to be having engine trouble, and was being repaired. And if I almost died this morning in a ridiculous accident, that's my secret. It was mid-afternoon when finally she was discharged from the hospital. After having been a captive for hours. Unless it was days. Noting the date on a calendar: April 13. The strangeness of this fact struck Rachael who'd never before given it a moment's thought. Numbered days!

April 13. The answer to a riddle.

When first Rachael had been carried into the ER in her dazed, disoriented state, a woman with bluish stiffened lips and a slow, erratic pulse, gauzy white curtains had been drawn briskly shut around her, and when she'd tried to sit up, she was restrained; her heartbeat examined, her blood pressure taken, and a nurse with a blurred moonface tested her mental acuity by asking her the date. Rachael murmured with her stiff, numbed mouth that felt like cotton batting she knew it was April...a month called April. The month of Easter...(But what was "Easter"? She hoped she wouldn't be asked.) But the specific date eluded her. Next, the nurse asked Rachael if she knew the year and after some hesitation Rachael said, "Is it...2000 yet? I think it is." (Not that she knew what "2000" meant. It seemed to her the height of human vanity, to attempt to measure time.) The nurse smiled as if Rachael had at last said something clever, and made a notation on her chart.

She was free to leave.

She was declared free of injury and free, at least for the time being, of symptoms, and so she was free to leave. Touching a live wire in the road, were you mad? Suicidal? When they'd been married, L-- would have accused her. For anything that befell Rachael, an intelligent woman admired by friends and colleagues yet a woman not without problems, a woman fully human, her occasional illnesses, accidents, professional crises, any misfortune, L-- seemed at once to blame her for.

Why? I love you so much, that's why.

Any hurt or offense to you, I resent.

It was a three-mile taxi ride back to 88 Pine Ridge Road. Into the wooded hills above the aging industrial city where, in residential neighborhoods, storm damage was most evident. There were badly ravaged and split trees, toppled trees, fallen branches, flotillas of withering leaves, puddles glittering like ice. Clean-up crews were working noisily, grinding debris. Rachael was relieved to see electric company repairmen. It was four P.M. and the sun had shifted in a sky partly mottled with cloud, still there was blinding, blazing light; Rachael shielded her eyes. How chill and astringent the air, how refreshing! As after a cataclysm. Pine Ridge Road was partly cleared of debris. It looked to Rachael both familiar and unfamiliar like a scene in a film she'd seen long ago and could remember only in patches. But I am here, alive. I am back. For a confused moment Rachael wondered if she were someone else, in the taxi, returning to another house: the Chatham house, across the street from the De Long house.

Maybe L-- was here already. Awaiting her?

She asked the driver to drive a little farther, to turn around in the cul-de-sac. She stared hard at the stretch of road where, that morning, she'd suffered a shock from a broken, weirdly humming wire...where the boy had bicycled, and fallen. I heard him cry out in pain. I did!

The electric wire had been repaired, evidently. There was no sign of breakage. The road had been cleared of debris except for scattered leaves. Of course, the boy's bicycle was gone. No sign, that Rachael could see, of the accident.

It was disconcerting to discover that Rachael hadn't locked the door of her house. The side door, off the kitchen, which she always used. But of course that morning, going outside, she'd been certain she would be back within an hour. The placidity of the house she'd left behind seemed to mock her. How trusting you were. Like any accident victim. So sure you'll return. Return to normal. The kitchen clock read 6:20 in defiance of the "real" time. Which meant that power had been restored in this neighborhood for only about three hours. "At least, it's been restored."

Walking through the house which was like a distant country to her. She'd come so far. She was so tired! Switching off lights she'd left on. For now the power was restored and daytime lights looked silly. There was a boy in the road. I saw him. I touched him.

In the weeks to follow Rachael would think: if her parents had been summoned up from Florida, to identify their only daughter's body in the county morgue, it would have destroyed them. They were in their late seventies and increasingly vulnerable to illnesses, medical conditions, wayward emotions, shocks. A stupid accident. So easily preventable. What was Rachael, that intelligent woman, thinking of! At least, she'd spared her parents that.

L-- had come to the hospital. What if L-- came out to the house, how could she send him away?

L--, not a name Rachael allowed herself to speak aloud. Nor even to think, in solitude. For never again would she be vulnerable to the man. Never again to any man, in fact. She wasn't a woman dependent upon men. I can love others. But I will never again be in love. I have that strength.

Now she had time to think, it was a puzzle! How L-- had known Rachael had had an accident, and where she'd been taken. It was true, she'd called Philadelphia friends; but it made no sense to her, that they might have called L--, or even knew how to reach him. L-- had been living in California, so far as Rachael knew. Yet there the man was, in the hospital waiting room, approaching Rachael with that look of eager concern; a husbandly look, a look of love.

Love and appropriation.

Love and hunger. Greed.

Rachael had felt a flame pass over her brain, sheer emotion.

"Get away! I don't know you! Don't -- touch me."

He hadn't touched her. He'd meant to, but seeing the look in her face, he had not.

That odd, hoarse whisper-- "Rachael."

Hurt and puzzled by her behavior. Was this pretense? Six years. Sometimes, in a weakened state, Rachael confused the loss of their unborn baby with the divorce, as if the latter had precipitated the former. Time can run backward. It's been known. In her mid-twenties, Rachael had translated Sappho's lyrics; the ecstatic hurt, the love-pain, bittersweet memory, confused with her own harsher, far less romantic experience. When L-- had seemed about to take hold of Rachael's hands she'd pushed away from him with a cry as if in terror of being burnt.

L-- was forty-two or -three years old yet still youthful. Taller than Rachael by several inches; a man who'd always used his height in an adversarial manner. He was lithe, feral-faced and attractive; the kind of man at whom women glance hopefully, even when there is no hope. He had the olive-pale skin of Mediterranean ancestry but oddly fair, thin, floating hair, faded to a silvery brown, straggling past his collar. When Rachael had known him, he'd kept his hair neatly trimmed. He'd been an aggressive attorney, moderately successful though never quite so successful as he'd wished. His eyes were dark and deep-set behind blue-tinted glasses. His mouth was thin-lipped and satirical. Yet approaching Rachael that day L-- had seemed genuinely concerned, and not at all satirical or mocking. Rachael was reminded, in the first seconds of seeing him, before fully recognizing him, of Bellona the jackal-headed Egyptian god of death; that sinister but noble heraldic figure she'd once been fascinated by, on an ancient funeral urn in the British Museum.

Fascinated that the colors of the figure, earth-brown, red-brown, black, should be so distinct, after thousands of years.

But L-- hadn't followed Rachael. (There were hospital security guards close by.) He hadn't been anywhere in sight when the taxi arrived. (At least, Rachael hadn't seen him.)

This day of shocks and dislocations.

Did I imagine him, too? I did not.

Never would she forgive L--. Who after her miscarriage had rarely made love to her again. As if her womb were damaged. In time she learned that her husband had been unfaithful to her with a number of women. Casual affairs. For sex was casual to him, evidently. Love was casual. And ephemeral. An illusion? You dare not believe, ever again. The last Rachael had heard of L-- he'd purchased or been given, by a wealthy benefactress, thousands of acres of land in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Redding, California. A stark, beautiful landscape Rachael had seen only in photographs. She'd heard that he had remarried, a younger woman. (Of course.) It was rumored he'd quit practicing law. Did he have children? He might even have divorced again, or his new wife died. He'd remarried. He was in some way involved with an artists' colony; or was it a religious community of some obscure sort, in those remote mountains?

Rachael smiled. She couldn't imagine L-- in any religious community unless L-- was himself the object of adoration.

Never again in love. But I can love!

Before leaving for Philadelphia, Rachael visited her neighbor Edith Chatham who'd called 911 to summon an ambulance for Rachael that morning. Thank you for saving my life! Rachael murmured, stricken by shyness, even as Mrs. Chatham herself seemed embarrassed, shaking her head and murmuring what a fright it had been! -- she'd gone outside to inspect damage done to her tulip trees, and happened to see a body, a person, lying out on the road. "I knew at once what it was. Those terrible, loose electric wires." Mrs. Chatham's house was even older than the De Long house, a large, weatherworn colonial that smelled inside of something medicinal, with an undercurrent of mothballs and talcum powder. Mrs. Chatham was in her late sixties, within Rachael's memory a vivacious and sociable neighbor of Rachael's parents, with children grown and moved away, as Rachael had done; she asked Rachael about her parents whose names she got wrong, and about Rachael's grandparents who'd been deceased, as Rachael gently explained, for twenty years. "Oh, dear! I should have known. I haven't seen them for a while." (Was this meant to be funny? Mrs. Chatham was so eager and grim, Rachael didn't think so.) Rachael had been thinking that Mrs. Chatham was a widow, but apparently she was not: Mr. Chatham, an invalid, existed in a forcible way, calling out to his wife querulously from an adjoining room where, it seemed, he was watching TV. Mrs. Chatham took no notice of him though he cried "Edith! E-dith!" repeatedly. Rachael tried to ask the older woman whether she'd seen a boy on the road, too; a boy who'd fallen from his bicycle, and might have been injured; but Mrs. Chatham, intent upon serving Rachael tea and fine-sliced fruitcake, though Rachael had explained she couldn't stay for more than a few minutes, continued to chatter about other things. I am her first visitor in a long time. Her own daughter has abandoned her. Mrs. Chatham wasn't yet an elderly woman but her plump, once-pretty, babyish face had a fuzzy look as if it were melting; her small close-set eyes were vague and startled, like flickering light bulbs in danger of burning out. She talked repeatedly of having found Rachael in the road and not recognizing her; she sighed, and pressed her ring-laden hand against her bosom, marveling how lightning had come so close the previous night, she'd been terrified, certain it had struck -- "And all of us electrocuted in our beds. Never knowing what hit us." In the adjoining room Mr. Chatham, whom Rachael recalled as a once-dapper, handsome businessman, who'd been friendly with Rachael's father, continued to mutter and curse, TV voices confused with his. Rachael made a show of sipping bitter black Ceylon tea, trying to listen to the older woman's meandering conversation, even as she was distracted by a large, faint, wine-colored stain on the carpet near her feet. This was a beautiful dusty-rose Chinese carpet that must have been an antique, worth many thousands of dollars. The stain was Alaska-shaped and looked fresh, pulsating with the beat of Rachael's blood. She said nervously, "I hope I didn't track that dampness in here. On my feet." Mrs. Chatham frowned. "Dampness? Where?" Rachael didn't want to point out the stain; for perhaps there was no stain; only when she narrowed her eyes did she see it, and then not clearly but as one might see something in memory. But it isn't mine. Not my memory. In the other room, Mr. Chatham groaned angrily. How was it possible that Mrs. Chatham didn't hear him? Rachael was the daughter of older parents, born when her mother was over forty; she understood the eccentricities of her elders, and had never judged her parents so harshly as her adolescent friends had judged theirs; yet, still, Mrs. Chatham's behavior was...strange.

With the excuse of wanting to look out the window at storm damage outside the house, Rachael got to her feet, moved to a position near the doorway to the other room, and glanced inside. A darkened room. No one. No Mr. Chatham. It's the echo of his voice. Permeating the house like old smells. Rachael realized suddenly that Edith Chatham had been a widow before her parents had moved to Florida.

"Rachael, dear? Is something wrong?"

Rachael shook her head as if to clear it. Blankly she smiled at the elder woman who was smiling so worriedly at her.

"You did have quite a shock this morning, didn't you? Poor girl, you still look pale. Would you stay for dinner? I -- "

Rachael said quickly, "Mrs. Chatham, thank you, but I -- I have another engagement. In Philadelphia." Was this true? It all seemed so long ago.

On her way out of the house, Rachael asked Mrs. Chatham what she'd been longing to ask from the first: had Mrs. Chatham seen a boy on the road that morning? a husky boy of about ten, riding a new, shiny bicycle, at about the time she'd seen Rachael and called an ambulance? But Mrs. Chatham shook her head adamantly. Her soft jowls quivered with a look of protest. "No. There are no children on Pine Ridge Road any longer. I saw only you." This odd blunt statement was made in a tremulous voice. Rachael said, "But there are new houses up the road, there must be young children in those families?" but Mrs. Chatham repeated, "There are none. You've all grown up and moved away forever. That was your wish, wasn't it? All of you."

Abruptly the visit was over. Rachael would have squeezed Mrs. Chatham's hand in parting, but the older woman drew back, shutting the door.

Moved away forever? But not me!

Next, Rachael made inquiries along Pine Ridge Road. She would get to the bottom of this mystery! She drove and stopped at each house in turn, even those that were darkened and clearly empty, hoping to be told yes there was a boy, the boy lives here, the boy's name is --, and here he is. (And the husky boy with the insolent blue eyes would run into the room guiltily smiling....) But she had no luck. How tired she was growing! Pulses beat in both her eyes. She was still rather shaken by her visit with Mrs. Chatham (and Mr. Chatham). Pine Ridge was not a neighborhood in which strangers rang doorbells, even with the excuse of being neighbors. You were allowed to know by looks of surprise and disapproval that you were not welcome. "Excuse me? I live at 88 Pine Ridge. This morning I saw a boy on a bicycle on the road, a boy of about ten.... There was a broken electric wire on the road.... Do you have a son? Do you know if your neighbors have a son that age? I...don't know the boy's name. He was alone." Rachael spoke with a number of residents, but no one was able to help her. One or two of these seemed to think that Rachael was looking for her own lost child, and were quick to assure her they hadn't seen him. At one of the newer, sleekly modern houses, a bearded stranger of vigorous middle age answered the door, and stared at Rachael as she stammered her request, and shouted for his son Adrian who was tall and lanky, about thirteen, a sullen boy with protuberant eyes, blemished skin and an insolent snake-tongue. The bearded father said angrily, "This him? He's been causing trouble, has he?" Rachael said quickly no, no trouble; and this wasn't the boy she was looking for. "You're sure?' the father said doubtfully. Rachael saw in the air between father and son a nimbus of shadowy, agitated waves; she flinched at the sight, of which the man and the boy were oblivious, staring at each other with grins of loathing. Rachael backed off, apologizing for having disturbed them. What will happen between them. someday!

But Rachael would long be departed. Rachael would not be a witness.

She gave up searching for the boy. The boy on the bicycle, the boy she had hoped to rescue. The boy who had disappeared. Very possibly, there was no boy. She would not think of him again. She'd ceased thinking of L--. Driving south to Philadelphia and arriving late at her darkened brownstone house, which she owned, on a residential street lined with acacia trees that had not been much damaged, so far as Rachael could see, by the storm. Washed her face, and the skin throbbed as if sunburnt. Tenderly bathed her eyes in cold water and examined them in the frank light of her bathroom: the pupils of both eyes were dilated, but equally; one was not conspicuously larger than the other.

Am I still alive?

I am!

II.

A WEEK LATER Rachael discovered a print-out in her handbag. WARNING SYMPTOMS FOLLOWING TRAUMA. Quickly she threw it away without glancing at it. She'd had no symptoms.

The shock, the "trauma" -- it had all been exaggerated.

She had no physical symptoms she was certain. Though there was a strangeness that frequently enveloped her, since the accident. An air of things being not-real. Even as beneath the surface of her daily life there seemed to be another life she was living intensely, secretly.

Dreaming while awake? I am not!

There was the episode with Morris B--.

Professor B-- had never been a lover of Rachael's though there were those who believed they'd had a love affair of long standing. A distinguished art historian whose field was Roman antiquities, a widower; and Rachael De Long, a brilliant younger woman who'd gone through a painful divorce in her late twenties. Rachael and B--; had been friends for years yet Rachael hadn't told him of her accident, and would not tell him. She didn't want to reveal such weakness to a man she so admired.... But meeting him for dinner one evening in late April, about twelve days after the accident, Rachael felt that cloud of strangeness envelope her; she stared at B-- whose skin appeared finely cracked like the glaze of ancient pottery, and a starburst of a lurid red birthmark was newly visible through his thinning hair. Rachael stood speechless, staring. B-- took her limp hand and kissed it, playfully, for such Old World-gentlemanly gestures were the professor's style, even as Rachael suppressed a shudder at the touch of his lips. So cold! Yet B--'s eyes were animated and soulful as always, beautiful eyes, the eyes of one who would have loved Rachael if circumstances had been different. He seemed to be pleading to her out of his mortal flesh. Now you see what I am. What I must become.

Rachael pressed her fingertips to her eyes. No, she didn't want to see!

B-- asked Rachael what was wrong, and Rachael said quickly that nothing was wrong. She'd been working late.... She'd become a little obsessed with her translating.... They sat in their usual booth in a romantic candlelit corner of the French restaurant and Rachael made an effort to be, to appear, normal; her normal self; clutching to a simulacrum of normalcy as one whose legs are stricken might clutch at surfaces to keep from falling. Rachael had given B-- her translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Aeneas in the Underworld, and B-- spoke of it enthusiastically, but with some criticism; and Rachael tried not to stare at her friend's cracked and corroded skin which gave his face a look of tragic mask-like dignity, through which his eyes shone with a hope that wrenched her heart.

Does he know? His death-to-come.

His hands, too, and his wrists where they were exposed beyond the cuffs of his white cotton shirt, were finely cracked. The natural whorls and creases exaggerated as if seen through a microscope. Rachael lifted her eyes to B--'s forehead, to the amazing birthmark she'd never seen before. It was so conspicuous, not to speak of it might seem odd. "Your birthmark? I didn't realize you had one, Morris." B-- touched his forehead, puzzled. He smiled uncertainly. "I'm not aware of a birthmark." Rachael said quickly, "Oh, it's this candlelight! It's my eyes." As B-- stared after her, Rachael excused herself and left the table. In the women's rest room she anxiously examined her eyes. The right eye was slightly bloodshot, the eyelid puffy and bruised. She tried to see, but couldn't determine, whether the pupil was larger than the pupil of her left eye. It isn't as if I am in a true Underworld. This is temporary. She'd brought along in her handbag a pair of oversized sunglasses with lenses so dark as to appear opaque. Absurd to wear them in this restaurant, but she had no choice; when she returned to their booth, B--'s features were shadowy and blurred, the birthmark hardly more than disfiguring smudge, like something melting down into B--'s face. He rose as she approached, gentlemanly, concerned, asking again what was wrong, and Rachael said with an apologetic laugh, "I had my eyes examined today and the pupils are dilated. Order for me, please, Morris! Anything."

Rachael it's been so long.

Rachael dear we just want to see you. To know you're well.

Her parents spoke urgently with her, on the phone. If Rachael didn't call them by eight o'clock Sunday evenings, they became anxious and called her.

"I'm fine! Really fine. Maybe in a few weeks...maybe in June...I can come visit."

Dreading a visit. To Coral Gables, shimmering in the sun.

Dreading what she might see. My eyes. Not me. It's temporary.

Rachael's father and mother rarely flew north any longer. Plane travel was too exhausting. Rachael flew to Florida to visit them at least twice a year and a visit was overdue and yet she could not bear to think of it, just yet. For she'd been having trouble recognizing people, lately.

Even at a family gathering in Baltimore, in May. What a hubbub of voices, laughter! Warmth and familiarity and embraces, kisses, a few tears, as Rachael stood stiff and smiling among them, desperate to hide the fact that most of these people were strangers to her. What was happening, what was wrong? Had she suffered some sort of brain damage? The world had become a test. Like a police lineup. You know some of these people are important to you, as you are important to them, but you haven't a clue which ones, or why.

An elderly woman with a pale, creased face and shiny blinking faded eyes and tremors in both hands. A mollusk pried from its protective shell. She clutched at Rachael's hand as if Rachael were a restless little girl eager to escape. The elderly woman's mouth moved, her thin lips were dampened with spittle in her effort to speak, but her words were muffled, as if a pillow were being pushed down over her face. What is it, dear? Why have you gone so far from us? You know we love you best. Rachael fumbled for her dark glasses, shoving them onto her face. Her eyes throbbed with their acute, sharpened vision. She heard herself laugh with the others, for a large family gathering (a wedding? but whose? not Rachael's, she was certain) is a happy occasion. You will return to us, dear? Soon? Rachael said Oh yes! I promise. Eager to escape! She removed the smoke-dark glasses and tossed them down in a defiant gesture but to her astonishment the room remained dark, the very air dark, so dark as to be nearly opaque.

She felt good! Hiking in the woods! It had been six weeks now. She was fully recovered from whatever it was, that had happened to her, or had almost happened. Rarely did she think of it now. Never spoke of it. Nor had L-- returned to her life. This visit was the first to the house on Pine Ridge Road since the weekend of the storm. Something drew me, I couldn't stay away. Approaching her house in her car she'd seen several children on bicycles, of whom one resembled the boy who'd run over the electric wire, the boy whose life (Rachael liked to think, though probably this was sheer fantasy) she'd saved, but when Rachael drew closer she saw to her disappointment, unless it was relief, that this was an older child, with a tentative smile for a neighbor driving by in her car, not that crude, cruel face of her dreams. She noticed with surprise that the Chatham house was boarded up, a forlorn For Sale sign in the front lawn among tall spiky grass and dandelions, abandoned for years you'd think, unsaleable. Yet she'd been inside that house only a few weeks ago....

The old Tudor house, the De Long house, was unchanged. No time had passed, here.

Rachael was eager to get outdoors, and hike. Couldn't stay away. No one knew I was there. In the woods beyond the Pine Ridge cul-de-sac where as a girl she'd hiked alone when the area was sparsely settled. It was May, yet damply cold. Dogwood bloomed tentatively in the woods, skeletal little trees dwarfed by larger, coarser trees. The sky was overcast, the hue of tarnished pewter. Rachael had no need for her ugly dark glasses today. Her eyesight was stronger, she'd been sleeping better lately. Tramping through tall sinewy grasses and thistles, making her way gradually downhill. After a while Rachael realized she was following the broad tire tracks of trucks, at first in grass, then in mud. She realized there was something wrong with the woods: silence. (No birds?) Her sensitive eyes began to sting before she smelled the acrid, gritty smoke. But how could there be smoke in these woods? The county incinerator at the foot of the hill had been shut down a decade ago. Rachael knew she should turn back, and hike in another direction, but something compelled her forward like an opened hand nudging at her back. Go on! See what there is to be seen. She saw a brackish stream laced with froth that looked, from a short distance, alive. She felt the earth quaver beneath her feet: a dump truck thundered along another, parallel road. Smoke rose in vaporous tendrils above the treetops, vanishing into the low gray sky. Her eyes stung from the gritty, poisonous smoke. She coughed, but did not turn back. She heard heavy machinery and men's voices. Yes, this must be the incinerator, a low sprawling building of badly stained dark brick, with several blackened smokestacks out of which the powdery-gray smoke lifted. There was a whirring and grinding and vibrating of heavy machinery. Dump trucks entered a clearing in the woods bounded by a six-foot, badly rusted chain-link fence. Rachael's eyes were throbbing now with pain but she persisted in watching. She saw trucks backing up against the building to dump their mysterious contents onto conveyor belts that carried them into the interior of the building, into the roaring furnaces. Rachael could hear excited voices, she could hear muffled cries and screams. Some of these are not quite dead yet. Why does it matter? In the woods beyond the cul-de-sac, in the incinerator beneath the tarnished-pewter sky, such technicalities did not matter. Rachael caught glimpses of men in shiny hard hats and fire-resistant coats. Workingmen they must be, union men, performing their jobs, day shift, night shift, overseeing the dump trucks and their cargo, making certain nothing, no one, escaped. Rachael could almost see the massive rippling fires in the furnaces, dense as lava. She marveled at the height of the chimneys, the tops of which seemed to penetrate the cloud layer. There were soundless explosions of smoke, a vibrating of the earth beneath her feet. Beauty in all things. This, you must see. She would try. But she wasn't so strong as she'd believed she was. We never are. In the tattered grass a few feet from Rachael, blown against the fence, was a strip of something red, faded red, a woman's scarf or shawl. Rachael was breathing shallowly, through her mouth. Her fingers thrust through the chainlink fence as if she were hypnotized. A stocky swarthy-skinned man, presumably a foreman, in a shiny hard hat, noticed Rachael watching, and beckoned to her with a sly smile, but how could she have obeyed him even if she'd wished to, the six-foot chain-link fence in her way?

HADES -- HELL -- is but the poetic term mankind has given to the life that rushes beneath our waking consciousness. A sewer of dark rushing water hidden by pavement. You can hear it rushing, you can smell it. You can feel its pulsations! Its power! Never can you see it. In the sewer of rushing water there is no GOOD -- no EVIL; no PURE -- no IMPURE; no HUMAN -- no INHUMAN.

All is energy. Dark rushing water. Rushing to the sea.

She'd begun to keep a notebook beside her bed. These nights of fiery dreams. Waking drenched in sweat, and shivering with excitement, pulling off her damp nightgown to/ling it onto the floor. No need to switch on a lamp. She could see in the dark! Her mind raced, she'd doubt she had been sleeping at all. A pen in her hand, rapidly writing, such wisdom the night revealed to her, and in the morning she would read what she'd written with no memory of having written it.

"Auntie Ra-chael!"

There came Rachael's godchild Cecie, the tour-year-old daughter of Philadelphia friends, running into the room and into Rachael's arms. An urgent wet kiss on the cheek. Rachael laughed with pleasure and a little embarrassment, she who was a godmother incapable of believing in God, and no one's mother. Cecie's mother Thea was one of Rachael's oldest friends, a writer, translator, professor of comparative literature in whose presence, this evening, Rachael was feeling awkward. She'd avoided Thea for weeks. Had not even returned Thea's concerned calls. Rachael what's wrong? -- that air of surprise and reproach in a friend's voice because apparently you are not friends, you are not intimate, you have your secret life unshared with us. "What did you bring me, Auntie Rachael?" the little girl giggled naughtily, fingers in her mouth, as predictably Thea said, "Cecie! That isn't polite." Rachael had brought her godchild a quite expensive set of pastel crayons and a large drawing pad with stiff white paper, it was Rachael's custom to bring Cecie a present when she visited, however frequently, or infrequently, she visited, and of course the child had grown to expect it, but what could you do? As Rachael told Thea it's too late to change, and I love it. But today, Cecie was strangely excited and bossy. Thea wanted to speak with Rachael, for she'd heard (what had she heard? from whom?) that Rachael hadn't been entirely well, Rachael had been taken by ambulance to a hospital, but Cecie continually interrupted the women, clapping her hands, rushing about, taller than Rachael remembered, and with a shriller voice; she ordered Auntie Rachael and Mommy to sit elsewhere in the living room, to "say your name SLOWLY and SPELL IT" -- under the influence, Thea explained, embarrassed, of a new teacher in her pre-school class. Rachael laughed, happy to oblige. She didn't want to be interrogated by Thea who gazed at her with searching eyes, probing prodding Thea who was the kind of woman Rachael might have been had she had her baby and remained married, a woman with both a functioning mind and a functioning body.

Cecie was a beautiful child, large limpid dark eyes, chestnut-red hair in wavy strands, Rachael had first seen her as an infant two days old and had been shaken by the astonishing fact of her, her friends' baby, inwardly marveling No words! No adequate words! and Rachael had burst into tears, so Thea -- and Thea's husband, who'd been present -- had reason to believe that Rachael De Long was their close, dear friend, their friend for life, for didn't Rachael love Cecie almost as much as her Mommy and Daddy loved her? Each time Thea tried to turn the conversation onto a serious subject, Rachael fussed and laughed over Cecie who was intent upon showing off, hovering about the adult women like a hummingbird, both shy and aggressive, fingers jammed into her mouth. She remarked, "Aun-tie Ra-chael help me draw." So Thea was excluded, and Rachael went with Cecie into Cecie's room and the two sat at Cecie's little table, Cecie eagerly drawing with the new pastel crayons, chattering rapidly, and Rachael praised her skill at drawing (were these gorgeously colored zigzag figures animals? monsters? deformed human beings?), the four-year-old's display of energy, though knowing from past experience that Cecie would soon become bored and restless; for hadn't Rachael had this experience already, with other presents she'd brought Cecie, educational games, and toys, and dolls, and books? A powerful sense of deja vu swept over her as if the little girl were herself, or Rachael was herself Cecie, and had lived through this interlude, and would live through it again, and again. For never is there release. There is no one to grant us release. Suddenly Rachael saw that Cecie's throat was scarred. In a panic; she tugged at the collar of the child's pullover. "Oh, Cecie, what is this? What happened to you?" It was a necklace of serrated scars, shiny like scales, were these burn scars? Rachael was sick with horror, lifting the child's pullover to see yet more scars on the child's thin chest. Or were these skin grafts? Rachael was moaning "Cecie, oh Cecie, my God" even as the little girl whimpered and squirmed away from her, and her mother hurried into the room to intervene. Rachael shouted, "Thea, what is this? These scars, burns -- " Rachael tried to show Thea the scars but Thea too was pushing at Rachael's hands; Rachael had made a terrible mistake; never would they forgive her; Cecie was whimpering, and had begun to cry. "Auntie Rachael is scaring me, Mommy!" Cecie said, hugging her mother. "I don't like her no more." Rachael who was quite upset tried to explain what she'd seen, or believed she'd seen, but Thea said forcibly, in her maternal-authoritative way Rachael had frequently envied, "Rachael, there are no scars on Cecie; there are no scars anywhere on Cecie, and you know it. Rachael, I'll have to ask you to leave." Without another word, for she saw it was hopeless, Rachael rose, and left the room; and Thea, holding Cecie in her arms, followed her, though not closely; the adult women were flush-faced, and the little girl was crying loudly, brattishly. At the door, Rachael stammered an apology as one might apologize for another person in one's charge, a person of diminished responsibility whose very existence is a matter of deep embarrassment.

Thea interrupted Rachael to tell her they'd discuss this another time, but she must go now, still Rachael hesitated trembling and white-faced and one of her eyes splotched with blood (so Thea would report in horror afterward) on the verge even then of saying Yet it might be avoided. A fire, an accident....

"Rachael, goodnight!"

The door was shut in her face.

Driving then quickly, blindly home. Desperate to hide herself, her shame. Lick her wounds. She'd lost Cecie! She'd lost Thea. Thinking of the poisoned crown and robes sent by the vengeful Medea to the beautiful young Greek princess who was Medea's rival for Jason's love. How the crown burst into flames on the doomed princess's head, how the robes clung to her flesh, burning, as the girl ran in agony, screaming as she died. It was a hideous spectacle. Though only recounted in Euripides, for violence was forbidden on the Greek stage, Rachael had many times seen the poisoned crown, the poisoned robes, the terrified shrieking princess, she'd all but smelled the cooking flesh.... She shook her head, to clear it. She must get control of herself. No one would do such a thing to a child. Of course, it would be an accident. With skin grafts, Cecie will survive.

SEEING WITH HORROR that her right eye was splotched with blood. She'd had a hemorrhage! The eye was gouged-looking, like a bloody socket. And her face of which she'd been innocently vain, an attractive, still youthful if rather long and angular face, a face her first lover had called beautiful and noble, now looked like a rag that's been wrung. No wonder they were disgusted by me. I am accursed.

It was very late. She was sick with fatigue. Two o'clock in the morning. Often she fell on top of her bed, not wanting to open the bed, removing no clothes, only her shoes. Like messages from the dead her translations were scattered about the house, even on the carpet. There came a knock at the door downstairs. No! Don't open it. Yet there was Rachael staggering like a drunken woman to the door, and she did open it. "Rachael. My darling." Before Rachael could send L-- away, he stepped inside and shut the door.

I've come to take you back with me, Rachael.

Back where?

To the West. Where I live now.

I live here, my life is here! I'm happy here.

No. That's an illusion.

My life is my own! My life is not an illusion.

When the illusion dissolves, when you wake from your dream, then your life will be real. I've come to bring you home with me.

But you already have a wife don't you? You have wives. And children, don't you have children, too?

There came a long pause. In the dark, she understood that L-- was smiling.

Yes darling Rachael! But I don't have you.

In the morning, when at last she woke from her drugged, exhausted sleep, L-- was gone. No sign of L--, or of any man, or lover.

Her body too which had become tight and virginal with the years, reverted to that body by day.

I can live like this for a long time. I have that strength.

The hemorrhaged eye was slow to heal. Rachael wore her dark glasses everywhere. A doctor told her she must have strained her eye working too much, or she was under strain -- "But it will heal." "My life? My life will heal?" Rachael asked lightly. The doctor seemed not to hear. He wrote her a prescription for eye wash and instructed her to use it when she woke in the morning, and before she went to bed at night.

The doctor's face: a clotted cobweb through which kindly eyes regarded her with sympathy. The man's breath was of the earth, but an arid, stony earth. Rachael was capable of not flinching at his touch when he examined her eyes for she'd learned to chide herself These are my illusions, and not real. Passing shadows.

Thea called, left a message. "Rachael? Please call me. I'm worried about..." but the tape was smudged.

Rachael erased the message. As if it had never been.

The boy on the bicycle! Rachael looked for him everywhere, and found him nowhere.

Even on Philadelphia streets she looked for him.

For she knew. She knew!

She'd never told L-- about the boy on the bicycle. The boy was her secret.

Except. Had he been a boy, or had that been a dog's face, and in her fright she'd been confused? One day staring at a fierce-eyed dog that barked, barked, barked at her, in a Philadelphia suburb; a mixture of bulldog and terrier, thick coarse sand-colored fur, a squat muscled body, prominent chest and jaws and alert upright ears. Saliva slathered on the dog's purplish lips. Bright glassy eyes fixed upon Rachael as if he knew her, barking her name, barking her fate, hackles raised and stump of a tail erect like a grotesque sexual organ. Cerberus guarding the portals of hell. As if I would wish to enter! In fact, it was a cemetery Rachael was leaving.

Morris B-- had died, unexpectedly. A cerebral hemorrhage.

Rachael had seen (had she? in a dream?) the explosion of blood in her friend's head, bursting through the scalp, the skin, seeping down his face. She'd seen, but had been unable to prevent. L-- assured her There was nothing you could do, darling. There never is.

His jackal-ardor. The rank smell of him. Underarms, crotch.

Yet it was strange: Rachael never saw L-- clearly. Only by lamp light. In shadow. His lean feral face and hungry eyes. His low wheedling seductive voice she heard like a voice inside her skull, echoing. Never had she invited her husband (no, L-- was her ex-husband) into her house, or into her bed, but she woke in the night to find him beside her, gripping her tight, naked and ravenous, as Rachael was naked and ravenous, bereft of all pride. Like Siamese twins, grotesquely joined at the torso and pelvis.

How different L-- was, as a lover, than he'd been in the long-ago days of their early marriage. Almost, Rachael believed L-- was not the same man.

He is the face of my weakness? Death enters us where we are least defended.

L-- had come for Rachael, to bring her with him to -- wherever it was. California? The Sierra Nevada Mountains? You know you love me. Rachael, it's only a matter of time.

Rachael laughed, though she was frightened.

Rachael laughed saying But everything is a matter of time!

Rain ran like sooty smudged tears down the window panes of her bedroom.

Rachael it's been so long.

Rachael dear we just want to see you. To know you're well.

She could forestall a visit no longer. She flew to Miami in early June and rented a car to drive to Coral Gables and in the car she circled the sun-dazzled little peninsula of condominiums; acre after acre of condominiums; like Egyptian pyramids they were; tombs of the dead; and everywhere were tropical flowers, vivid glaring colors like neon pulsing in her eyes. Long Rachael had been the attentive daughter. Long the loving daughter. The dutiful daughter. Since their retirement and move to Florida and increasing health problems, Rachael had been helping to pay her parents' expenses, which were considerable; and Rachael had taken over taxes and maintenance costs for the beautiful old Tudor house on Pine Ridge Road; for how could she surrender the past? She took on extra work, including night classes and editorial projects, to increase her income, for after all she was young, still.

She had reserves of energy like a car with a gas gauge that while reading empty isn't, quite.

L-- said, "Go now. See your parents. A final time."

Rachael said, angrily, "'A final time'? What do you mean? Leave me alone."

In the night, L-- had (accidentally?) I struck Rachael with the flat of his hand. In their sweaty Siamese-twin lovemaking. In the morning Rachael saw a glimmer of blood in her right eye; on the plane, she'd felt the eye ache and throb; she fumbled to put on her dark glasses, guessing the eye had hemorrhaged again. Yet her vision was so acute, penetrating. I see what's there. What is to come. For that reason she'd made an effort to appear utterly normal. She'd had her untidy hair cut and smoothly styled and she had purchased for this trip to Coral Gables a white linen suit and a white silk shirt and around her neck she'd knotted a gift from L--: a red silk scarf he'd left for her, draped over her naked torso like a shroud.

She wanted her parents to glance up at her, an attractive young woman of thirty-four, with a smile, before even they recognized her as their daughter.

Yet parking her rental car at the "assisted-living" residence, approaching the glass-and-stucco building in which her parents now lived, a sun-glaring hive, Rachael began to feel dread for her mission. Rehearsed her stammering words. Mother? Father? I love you.

Mother! Father! It's Rachael, who loves you.

Her throat seemed to close. She must have swallowed a burr, a thistle.

On previous visits Rachael had found her parents outside, at poolside. In an interior courtyard of palm trees, roses and bougainvillea. Such fragrant vegetation disguised the medicinal odors, the odors of decay. Mr. and Mrs. De Long would be with their fellow senior citizens on this balmy day. In that communal trance following lunch. Hazy no-time following any meal. For meals were the one pleasurable event now. Rachael was eager to see her parents yet her feet were heavy as horse's hooves. Dragging.

What they will see in my face. What I will see in their faces.

She entered the courtyard.... The pool! A lavish miniature sea. Its sparkling aqua water like shaken Jell-O. No one was swimming. Rachael stared through her darkened lenses at the elderly men and women strewn about the terrace like turtles in the sun: where were her parents? Which of the men was her father, and which of the women, her mother? (There was a notable predominance of women. Widows.) Rachael felt a stab of panic. This was like the wedding in Baltimore; this was worse than the wedding in Baltimore; so many elderly men and women, and any two of them might be her parents.... She stood at the edge of the terrace, hoping not to be seen. For the blankness in her face would betray her.

In Hades, the clamorous wraiths behaved as if brain-damaged, blind. To come alive even briefly they had to sip sacrificial blood. They were but hallucinations. Yet not lacking in identity, in significance. While these wraiths, strewn before her in sunglasses and straw hats and colorful summer clothing, like aged children, seemed indistinguishable from one another. Like any grouping of bodies after decay has set in.

Rachael then remembered: since his prostate cancer operation the year before, her father was attended by a practical nurse named Iris, a jovial black woman whose salary Rachael herself paid, and with whom she frequently spoke on the phone. Where was Iris? There were several black women in nurse's uniforms with elderly charges, male and female, and Rachael couldn't tell them apart, either. She saw a woman wearing a straw hat with a Laura Ashley band, which Rachael believed she'd given her mother; but when Rachael grew cautiously near, the elderly woman turned a blank, smiling-imbecile face toward Rachael, and Rachael shrank back in horror. "Excuse me. I'm...."

A number of the elderly were squinting at Rachael, some of them smiling hopefully. Are you my daughter? Have you come to see me? Overhead flew a flock of raucous gulls. Rachael saw these elderly bodies as they would appear to any predator. What meager meat, once the beaks begin their stabbing, slashing, tearing...

There: a pot-bellied little man with a querulous wizened face and collapsed chest, who looked familiar; he lay on a chaise longue by the glimmering pool, unmoving, and beside him sat, fanning herself with a copy of People, a busty black woman who resembled Iris. Was this Samuel De Long? But how diminutive and frail he'd grown! A few feet away sat a white-haired woman with an attractive, ruined face; this woman, fussing with needlepoint, resembled Rachael's mother to a degree, except Elinor De Long had always been fairly slender, and this poor woman looked as if her shapeless body had been poured into a child's pink play suit, like pudding.

Rachael drew breath to call out, but could not.

A black girl pushing her charge in a wheel chair noticed Rachael, who stood as if paralyzed, and said, in a friendly, concerned voice, "Ma'am? You lookin for somebody here?" but Rachael didn't seem to hear. Rachael was transfixed by the vision of stabbing beaks. The rapacious pitiless beaks. No more would the predators' beaks distinguish between these bodies than Rachael herself could. And why did it matter, really? Flesh splattered with blood, the brittle atrophied bones picked clean within minutes. The gulls would gorge themselves in a frenzy yet by the next dawn they would be ravenous again, for such is the destiny of gulls. Predator, and prey. For a tme you are predator, and then you are prey.

"Ma'am? Who you lookin for? I can maybe help you."

Rachael was so moved by the girl's kindness, she began to cry even as she turned away clumsily. Saying she'd made a mistake, she had the wrong address.

She found herself parking her car, hiking along the weedy cinder drive to the county incinerator. There was a tall, badly rusted wire mesh fence and a padlocked gate with a yellow warning sign

COUNTY PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING

Rachael stood at the gate, staring inside. The aged building, of weatherworn and graffiti-disfigured dark red brick, was clearly abandoned. Even the graffiti looked old, like ancient hieroglyphics, indecipherable. Tall, blackened chimneys appeared to be cracked in numerous places; moss grew on their sides; no smoke, surely, had erupted from them in years. Or so you would believe. Rachael thrust her fingers through the mesh gate, and strained to hear the roaring of the furnaces. Her sensitive nostrils could just detect a subtle, acrid-sweetish odor as of cooking flesh.

Night. L-- awaited her in the house. She ran out into the pelting rain and her clothing was soaked at once. Her hair streaming in her face. Above the treetops the sky was split with veinlike flashes of lightning but the lightning must have been miles away for thunder came belatedly, a low desultory muttering. Rachael lifted her face. No more! May my vision be taken from me. Again there was lightning, far away. Where?

The End