“I heard,” he said. “About Zacharias.”
She studied him for a moment without speaking. He had not been friends with Zacharias, who was two years older and had been away at college at IUP when Levi died. Nor had Mark decided upon an explanation for his sudden appearance on this empty corner, still in his work clothes, his pants and boots splotched with dry paint. But she showed no intention of asking, instead seemed to be trying to deduce it from his face. Her tone was even and empty of sarcasm when she responded: “So you know I’m engaged to a vegetable then.”
He shifted uncertainly. “I was thinking maybe I could see him,” he said then without thinking, unsure whether he asked because he could think of nothing else to say or because this was the reason he had come.
She gave him a strange look. “You wanna see Zach?” But then the look passed from her face, as though she had decided that her wondering was not worth the effort. She looked back at the hospital. “Well I’m having one of these over there first. Then if you still want, I’ll take you up to see him.”
He carried the bag for her as they returned. The outdoor sitting area was empty. She chose one of the maroon benches farthest from the street, then pulled two bottles of Yuengling from the bag and handed one to Mark. They sat and drank from the green bottles as the light began its slow fade, their breaths steaming and cooling in the air. For a while neither spoke, just sat looking at the hospital entrance as Abigail peeled the labels from her bottle and flicked the pieces onto the ground. The silence gathered between them in stealthy accumulation, first incurring a palpable weight, then growing fat with character, until it seemed to ape the chronic silence that had broken their romance years ago, to echo the abrupt silence that had announced Levi’s death by the river, to imagine the unknowable silence that now whirled in Zacharias’s head, until at last the silence grew too heavy to continue, seemed to collapse upon itself, and Mark spoke reflexively as though responding to physical law.
“I remember when I went to his brother’s funeral and Zacharias went up to the coffin.” He was not looking at her, but he continued to speak. “Up till that point he was rock-solid — you know. The big brother back from college, shaking hands with everyone and taking charge. But when it was his turn to go up to the coffin and look at Levi’s picture, it was like the whole thing just crumbled. He was just standing in front of it for a second or two, but then his hands went up to his face, he almost slapped himself, and suddenly he was all hunched over and shaking. And we were all just sitting there watching him. And after a while his dad had to take him away, and we never saw him again.”
She said nothing for a few moments, letting his words grow strange in the air. “Well,” she said finally, “I don’t know why you ever went to that funeral anyway.”
Mark hesitated, took a slug of beer.
Then her tone softened. “Let’s not start this, this kind of talk, the dead mourning the dead. Not yet.”
“All right.”
“I mean, you didn’t even know him,” she said, her voice stirring again. “Or Levi, really. God, I haven’t even seen you for years.”
“What do you mean?” He looked at her now. “I see you around all the time.”
“Maybe you saw someone else,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
“You saying you didn’t notice the Chinese guy hanging around Carrick?”
She let out a familiar sigh. “I’m not saying anything, Mark.” She finished her beer and stood up, and in the fading light he recognized some agitated kink in her stance that for an instant seemed to telescope the past eight years into something graspable. “You still want to see him or not?” she asked. He downed the last of his beer and followed her inside, leaving their bottles sitting empty on the bench.
When they reached the room that contained Zacharias, Abigail took the paper bag from Mark and set it down in the hallway by the edge of the open door. Then she motioned him in. He entered to find Zacharias’s parents and grandfather seated in a row of three chairs along the wall by the bed, on which Zacharias lay as if asleep. They looked up at him when he came in, the grandfather’s expression one of foggy incomprehension, something distantly savage in his decrepitude, and the parents reflexively smiling the feeble and exhausted smile that they had been practicing together for days, perhaps mistaking him for one of the hospital staff. They looked small and supplicant in their chairs beside Zacharias, whose substantial figure was stretched across the bed, seeming the size of the three of them combined. Abigail appeared behind Mark but lingered in the doorframe, saying, “This is one of Zach’s friends.” The parents nodded feebly at him, still smiling and saying nothing.
Mark stepped toward the bed. He had been this close to Zacharias only a few times, and only by accident, brushing past him in the halls between classes, or later vying with him for the attention of a bartender at Mario’s. His head was almost comically bandaged, the gauze baring what seemed a niggardly amount of face, from the eyelids to just below the lower lip. But even on this meager stretch of skin the shattered windshield and fatal trauma were fully manifest: his face was like a random side of a bruised pear, finely lacerated and discolored, softly misshapen, his closed eyes swollen and seeming sealed over with wax. A pair of tubes ran from the machine to converge in his mouth, force-feeding vital gases.
“Who is that?” the grandfather roared suddenly to no one, his jaundiced eyes seizing upon Mark in what appeared a kind of vague terror. The mother patted his hand and murmured, “A friend of Zach’s.” The grandfather grunted.
Mark glanced back at Abigail, who was leaning against the doorframe. She was not looking at him or anything else in the room. Instead her gaze was fixed on some faraway point beyond the walls, and her foot was steadily tapping the floor, betraying impatience. But framed within the doorway she appeared almost serene, and would have been a portrait of female serenity had she been painted in this moment, with her tapping foot stilled by the fixed colors. When she met his eyes her face grew rigid, breaking the illusion. She shot him a look demanding they leave.
He looked down again at Zacharias, taking in once more all of that mortal irreparability, seeing him now — a dead lump of living tissue — as the blunt implement of the Gorskis’ final erasure. Then Mark stepped away. The grandfather peered at him as if seeing him for the first time, blurting again, “Who is that?” — the dusty, fading patriarch, registering in perhaps only an intermittent glimmer the totality of his posterity’s irreversible failure. This time no one answered him. The polite feeble smile reappeared on the parents’ faces when they saw that Mark was leaving, and suddenly he felt sickened with some mixture of guilt and pity and scorn and revulsion. It was a shiteating smile, he realized. It was a smile of shiteating surrender, a sick swallowing-and-grinning expression of utter powerlessness, of private, implacable misery. They continued to smile gruesomely, smiling beside their dead son, and Mark retreated after Abigail, muttering some goodbye.
Outside, the night had been consummated. The stars shone cold and clear, almost ringing to Mark with some deep familiarity, some deeply familiar mystery. They went to sit inside the truck to drink the remaining beers, and Mark turned on the ignition to run the heater. The truck stammered intransigently, then fired on with a massive metal roar, then fell into its steady idled shuddering. They sat in the dark, drinking.