Do not-"
Nathan is sweating viciously. His eyes have shut.
Maria closes the Bible, her withered pinky finger marking the place. "Genesis. Your book, Nathan. The race of men whom I have created, I will wipe them off the face of the earth-man and beast and reptile and birds. I am sorry I ever made them." She nods. "Amen."
Maria leaves the Bible on her chest like an offering. "We are all God's children," she says.
"We could well be," Nathan replies hoarsely.
"Father Cleary helped me to see."
"He's not even Catholic."
"What does it matter what he is," Maria snaps. She calms, smiles. "I did want you to see, too. But you are too late. Praise God, I want Father Cleary to bury me. I want him to put me in the ground. And I want people to know who I was and what I did. I want Benny to know who I was. There is so much to be learned from my life." She covers her eyes. "But I won't be able to tell anyone what it is."
Maria trembles with comprehension. Glimpses of inconceivable dark, outer space, the misunderstood distances beyond the sun-a better and better view. Then a bitter expression crosses her eyes. She has seen something at the end of the bed. Her lips purse: it is Nathan. She opens her mouth to say something, deliver a final blow, then stops herself-
They both have heard it, and they stiffen at the same time, as dogs will at the first detection of danger: mad singing, hooting, sputtering laughter. The silhouette in the gauzy curtain rises out of the shadowbed and stands atop it and begins to sway, tubes and tape waving about the face, emitting a tra-la-la medley of childhood ditties.
Nathan focuses on a point in space over Maria, his face drained of all embarrassment and contempt. Maria, though, sits upright in bed, facing the curtain, enraptured. She watches the silhouetted contortions with courteous, even studious, attention.
Two residents and two male nurses, big men with broad backs and thick arms, come, and wielding a long syringe subdue Maria's neighbor, holding her until she goes limp and falls silent. They tie her down and reattach her tubes and tape them, then leave. Their footsteps fade down the corridor.
A last-minute bleat-Nathan grabs for his beeper but finds it with nothing to add. Then silence. The silence that comes after a loud noise; a strange, bad quiet that has the feel of permanence, as though the woman has not been put down but murdered.
The shadowbed is flat and still. Maria looks with weary suspicion toward the stillness, searching the translucent curtain for signs of life. Nathan watches the curtain himself, but as a child will keep an eye on the kitchen door while raiding a jar of honey, he stands, lifts the phone again, dials. He listens for a ring, then his own voice, "You have fifteen seconds to terminate this call-" Wincing, he brings the receiver to his hip, where his voice murmurs softly against the wool tweed. He is hating this. He counts out the fifteen seconds, lightly replaces the receiver, "Hey," he says to her gently. He bends near, remembering her in the morning before she washed. She was savage, full of rage, rampant with grace. Now she won't answer him. For a moment he believes she isn't alive. She lies weightless and silent and her body hidden. "Hey," he says again. She blinks. He tucks the top hem of the blanket under her shoulder, though he doesn't know why, except that it feels right. He touches her cheek with his fingertips. "I have to go," he says.
Still, the body under the covers and the tufts of hair on her head don't move. Though her eyes see. They have lost the glaze, and they are huge, outsized in her new head. She takes everything in through there, sight, sound, touch. Nathan knows he should stay but he can't repel the urge to leave, as though something is pulling him, something from out of the ground.
"Maria. I have to, I must, go."
Paper cups full of steam in both hands, Santos steps off the boardwalk onto the beach. A crowd has gathered at the waterline around a pen of yellow caution tape. The uniform cops there wander the perimeter, their flashlights dragging circles of light in the sand. Streaks of snow, as if the air is filled with hay. Beyond, the harbor's backwash bares pink lips of foam. Noise of boiling water, the frenzied clang of buoys. Thunder has begun to blast away far offshore.
Barbados, who had raced ahead, emerges out of the crowd and strides forward. But he is not picking his nails, blowing his nose, looking up, away, into the sky for his multitude of distractions.
"Why us-?" Santos begins.
"We have a situation here," Barbados says. The look on his face is new. There is none of the usual calm or active disinterest when they find their corpses. In the beginning there was horror and morbid fascination and numb voyeurism. Once there was pity. Now, at the scene, they give their cadaver as much attention as a shoe that needs tying. But Barbados is agitated. The two of them stand shapeless in their overcoats, their backs to the wind.
Santos tests his cup rim against his lower lip and blows. "Whose?" he asks.
Barbados aims his finger, Yours.
Santos hands him his cup and squints again at the mound lying motionless in the sand and begins to walk. There is little but the minor squalls of snow in the air, no shout, no murmur. He ducks under the caution tape. The other cops stop what they are saying. Santos looks and they look away. So Barbados has told them. Santos doesn't know what was said or why, and he'd just as soon walk away from here as find out who else in his precinct got found on this day besides the South American who fell from his ride to paradise, the runaway wife killed in a squatter's shack, the Russian paperhanger whose throat was cut from ear to ear then kicked ten flights into space. Tagged and printed and photographed and zipped into plastic sleeves in stairwells and bars and salt marshes and parked cars and subway tunnels, finally in that state they will not need to explain. No longer capable of transgression, free from the forest of perils.
The darkened afternoon is ripped away. Noonlight, handheld, explodes from the boardwalk. A reporter stands clutching her mike with one hand and the collar of her trench coat with the other. Other news vans have pulled up, their antennas telescoping skyward. Here, the silent crowd is scared and excited, craning their necks. There, kids mug for the cameras. In the klieg lights Santos watches his shadow lie down at his feet, stretching toward the waterline. He reaches for the plastic sheeting over the face. All eyes on him, he feels like a character in a play with cast and props but no script. He is a sucker, a dupe. This no job. How does it turn out this time? He is here, he now understands, to see someone he knows.
7 P.M.
Night, and the lights of New York expose a curdled, festering sky. Snow sifts over the city, filling dents in car tops and windowsill flowerpots, purifying the trash in the street. White lattice collects on the sewers. Snow touches the manhole covers, sits softly and is gone, leaving black circles in the street, screw holes where the city is held together. Somewhere a sanitation truck fitted with a plow recedes block to block, scraping the slush down to rails and old cobbles entombed by skins of asphalt. Though only dinnertime the streets are filled with a midnight vacancy, as though the city lies under curfew.
Claire brushes the grease and crumbs from her palms and holds out her hand. Ruth takes it uncertainly, shifting her briefcase to her other hand, then spreads her coat over her stool.
"Ah, the old drink," Ruth says happily, eyeing Claire's glass. "Martini for me, too,” she calls down the bar. "Another?" she asks Claire.