I present Paragraph 14, the section entitled “Zeus Complex”: “The egocentric Man seeks to taste immortality by engaging in demanding physical challenges, wholeheartedly bringing himself to the brink of death in order to taste an egotistical sense of accomplishment, of victory. Such a feeling is false and short-lived, for Nature’s power over Man is absolute. Man’s honest place is not in extreme conditions, where, let’s face it, he’s frail as a flea, but in work. It is in building things and governing, the creation of rules and ordinances. It is in work Man will find life’s meaning, not in the selfish, heroin-styled rush of hiking Everest without oxygen and nearly killing himself and the poor Sherpa carrying him.”
Due to Paragraph 14, I didn’t tell Dad. He’d never have let me go, and though I hadn’t especially wanted to go myself, I also didn’t want the others to go and have a mind-blowing experience without me. (I had no idea how mind-blowing it would actually be.)
“I’m proud of you,” Dad said.
“Dad,” was all I could scuff. I did manage to touch his hand and it responded like one of those mimosa plants, but in the opposite way, opening.
“You will be fine, little cloud. Fine. Fine as a fiddle.”
“Fit,” I scratched.
“Fit as a fiddle.”
“Promise?”
“Of course I promise.”
An hour later, my voice had begun to tiptoe back. A new nurse, Stern Brow (illicitly kidnapped by White Lab Coat from another floor of the hospital, in order to placate Dad) took my blood pressure and pulse (“Doin’ fine,” she said before humphing off).
Although I felt bug-snug under the sunshine lights, the hospital beeps, clicks and toots soothing as fish noises one hears in the ocean while snorkeling, gradually, I noticed my memory of the night before had begun to show signs of life. As I sipped my coffee listening to the aggravated mutters of a croaky gentleman recovering from an asthma attack on the other side of the curtain (“Reely now. Got to get home and feed my dog.” “Just another half hour Mr. Elphinstone.”), suddenly I was aware Hannah had snuck into my head: not as I’d seen her—God no—but sitting at her dining room table listening to one of us, her head tilted, smoking a cigarette, then ruthlessly stabbing it out on her bread plate. She did that on two occasions. I also thought about the heels of her feet, a tiny detail not many others noticed: sometimes they were black and so dry, they resembled pavement.
“Sweet? What’s the matter?”
I told Dad I wanted to see the policeman. Reluctantly, he agreed and twenty minutes later I was telling Officer Coxley everything I could remember.
According to Dad, Officer Gerard Coxley had been waiting patiently in the Emergency waiting room for over three hours, shooting the shit with the attendant nurse and other Low Priority patients, drinking Pepsi and “reading Cruising Rider with such an immersed expression I could tell it’s his secret instruction manual,” Dad reported with distaste. Yet Still Life patience appeared to be one of Gerard Coxley’s predominating characteristics (see False Fruits, Drupes and Dry Fruits, Swollum, 1982).
He sat with his long skinny legs crossed like a lady’s on the low blue plastic chair Stern Brow had carried in for the occasion. He balanced a withered green notepad on his left thigh and wrote on it, left-handedly, in ALL CAPS, with the speed of an apple seed burgeoning into a ten-foot tree.
Midforties, with messy auburn hair melting over his head and the drowsy squint of a late-August lifeguard, Officer Coxley was also a man of reductions, of distillations, of one-liners. I was propped up with pillows (Dad shadowing Coxley at the foot of the bed), trying my hardest to tell him everything, but when I completed a sentence — a complex sentence, full of invaluable details painstakingly mined from all that darkness, because confusingly, none of it seemed real anymore; every recollection now seemed Mr. DeMille-lighted in my head, all klieg lights and special effects and lurid stage makeup, pyrotechnics, atmospherics — after all of this, Officer Coxley would write down only one, maybe two words. ST. GALLWAY 6 KIDS HANA SCHEDER TEACHER DEAD? SUGARTOP VIOLET MARTINEZ.
He could shrink any plot of Dickens into haiku.
“Only a few more questions,” he said, squinting at his e.e. cummings poem.
“And when she came and found me in the woods,” I said, “she was wearing a large satchel, which she hadn’t had on before. Did you get that?”
“Sure I got it.” SATCHEL
“And that person who followed us, I want to say it was a man, but I don’t know. He was wearing large glasses. Nigel, one of the kids with us, he wears glasses, but it wasn’t him. He’s very slight and he wears tiny spectacles. This person was large and the glasses were large. Like Coke bottles.”
“Sure.” BOTTLES
“To reiterate,” I said, “Hannah wanted to tell me something.”
Coxley nodded.
“That was the reason she took me away from the campsite. But she never got to tell me what it was. That was when we heard this person near us and she went after him.”
By now my voice was nothing more than wind, at its most emphatic, a jet stream, but I wheezed on and on, in spite of Dad’s concerned frown.
“Okay, okay. I got it.” CAMPSITE Officer Coxley looked at me, raising rambutan-eyebrows and smiling as if he’d never had an Eyewitness quite like me before. In all probability, he hadn’t. I had a disturbing feeling Officer Coxley’s experience with Eyewitnesses was geared not toward murder or even burglary, but motor vehicle accidents. The fifth of his series of questions (posed in such a bland voice, one could almost see the paper labeled EYEWITNESS QUESTIONNAIRE thumbtacked to the station bulletin board next to a sign-up sheet for the 52nd Annual Auto Theft Weekend Roundtable and the Police Intra-Personals Corner, where department singles posted their Seekings in twenty-eight words or less) had been the supremely disheartening: “Did you notice any problems at the scene of the mishap?” I think he was hoping I’d say, “Out-of-order traffic signal,” or “Heavy foliage obscuring a stop sign.”
“Have any of them been found yet?” I asked.
“We’re working on it,” said Coxley.
“What about Hannah?”
“Like I said. Everyone’s doing their job.” He ran a thick podlike finger down the green notepad. “Now can you tell me more about your relationship to—?”
“She was a teacher at our school,” I said. “St. Gallway. But she was more than that. She was a friend.” I took a deep breath.
“You’re talking about—”
“Hannah Schneider. And there’s an ‘i’ in her last name.”
“Oh, right.” I
“Just to be clear, she’s the person I think I saw…”
“Okay,” he said, nodding as he wrote. FRIEND
At this point, Dad must have decided I’d had enough, because he stared at Coxley very intensely for a moment and then, as if deciding something, stood up from the end of the bed (see “Picasso enjoying high times at Le Lapin Agile, Paris,” Respecting the Devil, Hearst, 1984, p. 148).
“I think you must have everything then, Poirot,” Dad said. “Very methodical. I’m impressed.”
“What’s that?” asked Officer Coxley, frowning.
“You’ve given me a new respect for law enforcement. How many years on the job now, Holmes? Ten, twelve?”
“Oh. Uh, going on eighteen now.”