"WHAT DO YOU drink?'' I asked her as another idea came.
She looked at me as though I were a fool.
"What do you drink?" I repeated. "If the water's off and you have no Sparklett's."
"I don't know," she muttered, glaring at me. "Juice or--"
"Isn't it spoiled?" I interrupted.
"Canned juice; / don't know."
"You said--"
She turned away from me.
"What do you eat?" I persisted.
"I can't cook without electricity," she said as if it were an answer rather than an evasion.
"Are you hungry now?" I asked.
Again, that baleful look.
"Are you ever hungry?"
"Not often," she answered coldly.
Was any of this getting through to her? I was growing weary of tortuous effort. Rashly, I made my point direct. "Do you ever eat or drink?"
She averted her eyes with a hiss of irritation. "What do you think?'' she snapped. I tried walking closer to her only to stop as Ginger growled again. "Why does she keep doing that?'' I asked. I sounded irritated now. "I'm not here to hurt you."
"You couldn't if you wanted to," she said.
I almost answered in kind. God help me, Robert. There to assist her and I almost responded with anger. Closing my eyes, I fought to regain my motivation.
When I opened my eyes again, I noticed her car outside and yet another notion came.
"Is that the only car you have?'' I asked.
For the third time, that critical look. "We all have cars," she said.
"Where are they then?"
"Being used, of course."
"By your children?"
"Obviously."
"What about your husband's car?"
"I told you he was in an accident," she said, stiffening.
"Someone said you have a camper."
"We do."
"Where is it?"
She looked at the place where we had always kept it parked and a look of confusion distorted her face. She'd never even thought about it before, the realization came.
"Do you know where it is?" I prodded.
She turned on me in annoyance. "It's being repaired," she said.
"Where?" I asked. She blinked, looked momentarily disturbed. Then the vacant look was back again. "I don't remember," she said. "I'm sure I have it written down some--"
She broke off as I pointed at her car. "How did it get dented?"
"Someone hit it in a parking lot while I was shopping."
Her smile was bitter. "That's the way people are," she said. "Whoever did it just left without telling me."
"You were shopping?" I asked. "I thought you said you never left the house."
I heard a tinge of instability in her voice as she answered, "That was before the battery went dead.''
We were back where we started, the convoluted turnings of her mind endlessly thwarting me. No matter what I tried, I couldn't make a point she'd recognize much less react to. This gray world she existed in made sense to her. Horrible, depressing sense but sense nonetheless.
The wheels in my mind were turning more slowly now. I could think of nothing new to try and, so, returned to an earlier approach. Maybe if I pushed it harder.
"You never told me what your children's names are," I said.
"Don't you have to leave?" she asked.
I started, not expecting that. I'd forgotten this was life to her. In life, she would have wondered why a strange man lingered in her house.
"I'll leave soon," I said. "I just want to talk to you a little longer."
"Why?"
I swallowed. "Because I'm new in the neighborhood." It seemed like a feeble answer but, for some reason, she didn't question it. "What did you say your children's names are?" I asked. She turned from the window, walking toward the living room.
It was the first time she'd avoided a question by refusing to answer, I thought. Was this a positive sign? I followed her and Ginger, asking, "Is your younger son named Ian?"
"He's in school," she answered.
"Is his name Ian?"
"He'll be home later."
"Is his name Ian?"
"You'd better leave. He's very strong." "Is his name Ian?"
"Yes!"
"My son's name is Ian too," I told her.
"Really?" Disinterest. Was it feigned or actual?
"Is your older girl named Louise?" I asked.
She glanced across her shoulder as she moved into the living room. "Why don't you--?"
"Louise?"
"Why don't you go home?"
"Louise ?"
"What if it is?" she demanded.
"My older daughter's name is Louise too."
"How interesting." Sarcasm as resistance now. She walked to the glass door, Ginger at her heels. Was she retreating from me bodily now? And did she know that she was doing it? "Is your older son's name Richard?"
"Look at that pool," she murmured.
"Is your older son's name Richard?"
She turned, an expression of resentment on her face. "Look, what do you want?" she asked, her voice rising
I almost said it all--unvarnished, laid out in a row. Then something stopped me. It was amazing I still had that much awareness. My perceptions were becoming more and more blunted as time passed.
I smiled as nicely as I could. Love, I thought. It has to be done with love. "I'm just interested in the remarkable similarities in our lives," I said.
"What similarities?" she lashed out.
"That I look like your husband for one."
"You don't." She cut me off. "Not at all."
"You said I did."
"No, I didn't."
"Yes, you did."
"Then I was wrong!" she flared. Growling, Ginger showed her teeth once more.
"All right, I'm sorry," I said. I had to be more careful. "I wasn't trying to make trouble. It just seemed remarkable to me."
She gazed out through the glass door again. "I don't see anything remarkable at all," she muttered.
"Well... my wife named Ann. My children's names the same as yours."
She turned on me again. "Who said they were the same?" she demanded.
"And my name Chris,'' I said. She twitched sharply, gaping at me. For an instant, something lifted from her eyes instead of settling over them. I felt my heartbeat jolt.
It passed as quickly as it came.
A burst of raging anguish filled me. Damn this filthy place! I thought. I shuddered with the rage.
And felt myself grow denser with it.
Stop! I thought. I couldn't though. I had no ability to reverse the process. Instead of helping her, I was descending to her world.
No, I thought. I won't do that. I was here to take her from this place, not join her there.
She'd turned away again by then, staring through the murky glass, once more drawing her oppression around her like a guarding mantle.
"I don't know why I don't just put this place up for sale and leave," she said. Another sound of embittered humor. "Who'd buy it though?" she continued. "The best real estate agent in the world couldn't sell it." She shook her head in disgust. ' The best real estate agent in the world couldn't give it away."
She closed her eyes now, lowering her head.
"I keep polishing the furniture," she said, "but dust keeps settling on it. It's so dry; so dry. We haven't had a drop of rain in such a long time, I--"
She broke off. That, too, I thought, despondently. Of course that would be part of Ann's particular hell: lack of rain and browning greenery.
"I can't stand filth and confusion," she said, her voice beginning to break. "Yet all I see is filth and confusion."
I started forward once again and Ginger braced herself to leap.
"Damn it, can't you see I only want to help,'' I said, my voice rising.
Ann jerked around, recoiling from me and I felt a burst of agonized reproach inside myself. I drew back quickly as Ginger started for me, snarling. "All right, all right," I murmured, raising my hands in front of me.
"Ginger,'' Ann said sharply.
Ginger stopped and looked at her.
My mind felt numb with defeat. Everything I'd tried had failed. Now this blunder. For all I knew, I was farther from helping Ann now than before I'd arrived. How vividly I saw what Albert had meant.
This level was a cruel and cunning trap.
"People borrow books and don't return them," Ann said, continuing as though nothing had occurred. "My best jewelry is gone. I can't find it anywhere. My best clothes are missing."
I stared at her with no idea whatever what to say or do. She was hiding again, holding the details of her plight between herself and any possible understanding of them.
"I don't know who took those chessmen either," she said.
"My wife had a chess set like that made for me," I told her. "One Christmas. A man named Alexander built it."
Ann shuddered. "Why don't you leave me alone?"
I lost control.
"You must know why I'm here," I said. "You must know who I am."
That maddening look in her eyes again; the filming away, the blind withdrawal.
"Ann," I said. I reached out, touching her.
She gasped as though my fingers burned and, suddenly, I felt Ginger's teeth clamp hard into my arm. I cried out and tried to pull away but she tightened her grip so that I dragged her across the carpeting by her hind legs. "Ginger!" I "shouted.
My voicing of her name came simultaneously with Ann's.
Immediately, the bite was released and she was back beside Ann, trembling with reaction. Raising my arm, I looked at it. Yes, pain was definitely possible there. And blood. I watched it oozing darkly from the punctures.
Afterlife, I thought. It seemed a mockery.
No flesh, yet pain and blood.
There is only death!
I LOOKED UP from my arm to see Ann start to cry. She was stumbling across the room, tears running down her cheeks. As I watched, she slumped down on the sofa and pressed her left hand over her eyes.
The pain in my arm seemed slight now compared to the new despair I felt. Without thinking, I started toward her again, then jerked to a halt as Ginger made a lurching movement toward me, her growl now mixed with a frantic wheezing sound which told me how disturbed she was. I drew back hastily as Ann looked up, her face a mask of wretched anger.
"Will you go?" she cried.
I backed off slowly, watching Ginger. As she settled down into a nervous crouch, I stopped. Looking behind me, I saw that I was standing near the piano bench and, backing up another few feet, I lowered myself onto it slowly, my gaze still fixed on Ginger.
"I want Chris," Ann murmured, sobbing.
I stared at her, completely helpless.
"I want him back. I need him," she said. "Where is he? Oh, God, where is he?"
I swallowed. My throat was dry; it hurt. My arm ached from the bites. I might as well be alive again. This level was so horribly close to life. And yet so horribly far, only racking sensations present, no compensations of any sort.
"Tell me about him," I heard myself ask. I didn't know why I said it. I was straining now. The effort grew more arduous with every passing moment.
She only wept. "What did he look like?" I asked. Once again, I knew what I'd begun. What I didn't know was if it would work. Why should it? Nothing else had.
Still, I went on. "Was he tall?" I asked.
She drew in shaking breath, fingering tears from her cheeks.
"Was he?"
She nodded jerkily.
"As tall as I am?" I asked.
She didn't reply. A shuddering sob instead.
"I'm six foot two. Was he as tall as me?"
"Taller." She pressed her lips together.
I ignored her reaction. "What color hair did he have?" I asked.
She rubbed her eyes.
"What color hair?"
"Go away," she mumbled.
"I'm only trying to help."
"I can't be helped." Through gritted teeth.
"Everybody can be helped," I told her.
She looked at me, expressionless.
"If they ask,'' I said.
She lowered her gaze. Had the significance of what I'd said reached her mind in any way at all?
I asked another question. "Was he blond?'' She nodded once.
"Like me?"
Her teeth clenched again. "No.''
I fought an overwhelming urge to give up, stand, walk out of the house, go back to Summerland and wait. It all seemed so utterly hopeless.
"What did he do?" I asked.
She had her eyes shut. Tears squeezed out from underneath the pressing lids and trickled down her pale cheeks.
"I heard he wrote for television."
She mumbled something.
"Did he?"
"Yes." Through gritted teeth again.
"I do too," I said.
It seemed unbelievable to me that she could not see the connection. It was so incredibly obvious. Yet she didn't. Never had the meaning of the phrase been so vivid to me: None so blind as those who will not see.
I wanted to leave But I couldn't desert her. "Were his eyes green?" I asked, plodding on.
She nodded weakly.
"Mine are too," I said.
No response.
I shuddered fitfully. "Ann, can't you see who I am?" I pleaded.
She opened her eyes and, for another of those moments, I had the feeling that she recognized me. I tightened, leaning toward her. Then she averted her face and I shuddered again. Dear God, was there no way in heaven or hell of reaching her?
She turned back quickly. "Why are you doing this to me?" she demanded.
"I'm trying to convince you who I am."
I waited for her inevitable question: Who are you? It never came. Instead, she slumped back on the sofa, closing her eyes, shaking her head in slow, weary turns from side to side.
"I have nothing," she said. I couldn't tell if she was speaking to herself or me. "My husband's gone. My children are grown. I'm all alone. Deserted. If I had the courage I'd kill myself."
Her words horrified me. To have committed suicide and ended up in a place so dreadful that it made her think of committing suicide. A twisted, unrelenting reflection within a reflection.
"I feel so heavy," she said. "So tired and heavy. I can barely lift my feet. I sleep and sleep but always wake exhausted. I feel empty. Hollow."
Albert's words returned to torment me. "What happens to suicides," he'd said, "is that they have a feeling of being hollowed out. Their physical bodies have been prematurely eliminated, their etheric bodies filling the void. But those etheric bodies feel like empty shells for as long a time as their physical bodies were meant to live."
It came to me, at that moment, why it had been impossible to reach her mind.
By placing herself in this spot, she had removed her mind from all positive memories. Her punishment--albeit self-inflicted--was to recall only the inimical things in her life. To view the world she remembered through a lens of total negativism. To never see light but only shadow.
"What is it like to be here?" I asked impulsively. There was a cold sensation in my stomach. I was starting to feel afraid.
Ann looked at me but seemed to gaze into the darkness of her thoughts as she answered. Speaking at length for the first time.
"I see but not clearly," she said. "I hear but not clearly. Things happen that I can't quite grasp. Understanding always seems a few scant inches from me. I can never reach it though. Everything is just beyond me. I feel angry for not seeing or hearing distinctly, for not understanding. Because I know it isn't me that's missing things. But that everything around me is vague and held those few, scant inches from my understanding. That I'm being fooled somehow. Tricked.
"Things happen right in front of me and I see them happen but I'm not sure I'm getting them even though it seems I am. There's always something more going on that I can't figure out. Something I keep missing even though I don't know how I'm missing it or why.
"I keep trying to understand what's happening but I can't. Even now, as I speak to you, I feel as though I'm missing something. I tell myself that I'm all right, that everything around me is distorted. But, even as I'm thinking it, I get a premonition that it is me. That I'm having another nervous breakdown but can't identify it this time because it's all too subtle and beyond my comprehension.
"Everything eludes me. I can't describe it any better. Just as nothing works in the house, nothing works in my mind either. I'm always confused, off center. I feel like my husband must have, in dreams he used to have."
I found myself leaning toward her, anxious to capture every word she spoke.
"He'd be in New York City, for instance, and be unable to get in touch with me no matter how he tried. He'd talk with people and they'd seem to understand him and he'd seem to understand them. But nothing they'd say would work out. He'd dial telephones and get wrong numbers. He'd be unable to keep track of his belongings. He couldn't remember where he was staying. He'd know he was in New York for a reason but couldn't remember what the reason was. He'd know he didn't have enough money to get back to California and all his credit cards were missing. He'd never be able to figure out what was going on. That's how I feel."
"How do you know this isn't a dream then?" I asked. A glimmer.
"Because I see and hear things," she answered. "I feel things."
"You see and hear... you--feel in dreams too," I replied. My mind was laboring but I sensed that there was something there. A connection.
"This isn't a dream," she said.
"How do you know?" "It isn't a dream."
"It could be."
"Why do you say that?" She sounded upset again.
"I'm trying to help you," I said.
She answered, "I wish I could believe that."
It seemed as though a faint light touched the shadows in my mind. She hadn't believed me at all before. Now she was wishing she could believe. It was a small step but a step.
A new idea occurred; the first I'd had in a long time, I realized. Was something clearing in my mind? "My son, Richard, has been ..." I paused, the word eluding me. "--looking into ESP," I finished.
When I'd spoken his name, her face had tightened.
"He's been talking to a psychic," I said.
Again, the tension in her face. Was I harming her or helping? I didn't know. But I had to go on.
"He's come, after much thought, to believe--" I braced myself. "--that there's life, after death."
"That's stupid," she said immediately.
"No." I shook my head. "No, he believes it. He feels there's proof that survival exists."
She shook her head but didn't speak.
"He believes that murder is the worst crime anyone can commit," I said. I looked directly into her eyes. "And suicide."
She shuddered violently; tried to stand but didn't have the strength and sank back down again. "I don't see..." she said. My mind felt clearer now. "He believes that the taking of life is reserved to God alone," I told her.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked in a low, shaking voice. She trembled as she spoke, huddling against the sofa. Ginger was looking at her frightenedly, ears back. She knew something was wrong but couldn't fathom what.
Again, I braced myself. "I'm telling you because my wife committed suicide," I said. "She took an overdose of sleeping pills."
That blank look crossing her eye again. For some reason, it lifted almost instantly as though she couldn't manage to retain it. She shook her head. "I don't believe..." she started. Her voice sounded feeble.
My mind felt clearer yet. "What bothers me is that Richard believes she still exists," I said.
No sound. A shaking of her head.
"That she's in a place not unlike our house," I said. "But a gloomy, negative version of it. Everything depressing and cold. Not functioning. Dirty and disordered."
Her head kept shaking. She mumbled inaudible words.
"I think he's right," I said. "I think that death is a continuation of life. That the person we are persists afterward."
"No." An escape of sound, like a stricken breath.
"Can't you see?" I asked. "Your house was beautiful and warm and bright. Why should it be like this? Why?"
She kept drawing back. I knew she was terrified but had to continue. This was the first approach that had accomplished anything.
"Why should your house look so ugly?" I asked. "Does it make any sense? Why should the gas and electricity and water and telephone all be off? Is there any logic to that? Why should the lawns and bushes and trees all be dying? Why should the birds all be dying? Why shouldn't it rain? Why should everything in your life go bad at the same time?" Her voice was faint. I think she said, "Leave me alone."
I kept it up. "Don't you see that this house is only a replica of the home you knew? That you're only here because you believe it's real? Don't you see you're making this existence for yourself?"
She shook her head, looking like a panicked child.
"Can't you understand why I'm telling you these things?" I said. "It's not just that my children have the same names as yours. Not just that my wife has the same name as yours. Your children are my children. You are my wife. I'm not just a man who looks like your husband. I am your husband. We've survived--"
I broke off as she lurched to her feet. "Lies!" she shouted.
"No!" I jumped up. "No, Ann!"
"Lies!" she screamed at me. "There is no afterlife! There is only death!''