Winter 2007 Read Online Free PDF Page A

that would
preclude her reanimation. I cleared the last fluid from her lungs with a
syringe.
    By this time I could not
tell you exactly what I was doing. I felt imbued with preternatural,
instinctual knowledge and power, although I had neither. What I had were
delusions of grandeur spurred on by alcohol and the words of my friends,
tempered perhaps by memories of my parents’ art.
    Lucius held the lantern and
kept muttering, “Oh my God” under his breath. But his tone was not so much one
of horror as, again, morbid fascination. I have seen the phenomenon since. It
is as if a mental list is being checked off on a list of unique experiences.
    By the time I had finished,
I knew the dead woman as intimately as any lover. We took her down to the
sargassum bed and we laid her there, floating, tethered by one foot using some
rope. I knew that cove. I’d swum in it since I was a child. People hardly ever
came there. The sargassum was trapped; the tide only went out in the spring,
when the path of the currents changed. The combination of the salt water, the
preservatives I’d applied to her, and the natural properties of the sargassum
would sustain her as she made her slow way back to life.
    Except for the sutures, she
looked as if she were asleep, still with that slight smile, floating on the
thick sargassum, glowing from the emerald tincture that would keep the small
crabs and other scavengers from her. She looked otherworldly and beautiful.
    Lucius gave a nervous
laugh. He had begun to sober up.
    “Any suggestions on what we
do next?” he said. His voice held disbelief.
    “We wait.”
    “Wait? For how long? We’ve
got classes in the morning. I mean, it’s already morning.”
    “We wait for a day.”
    “Here? For a whole day?”
    “We come back. At night.
She’ll still be here.”
    ***
    There’s nothing in the
nature of a confession that makes it any more or less believable. I know this,
and my shadow on the beach knows it, or he would have talked to me by now. Or I
would have talked to him, despite my misgivings.
    I haven’t seen Lucius in
forty years. My shadow could be Lucius. It could be, but I doubt it.
     
    Part II
    In the morning, for a time,
neither Lucius nor I knew whether the night’s events had been real or a dream.
But the cart outside of our rooms, the deep fatigue in our muscles, and the
blood and skin under our fingernails—this evidence convinced us. We
looked at each other as if engaged in some uneasy truce, unwilling to speak of
it, still thinking, I believe, that it would turn out to have been a
hallucination.
    We went to classes like normal.
Our friends teased us about the bet, and I shrugged, gave a sheepish grin while
Lucius immediately talked about something else. The world seemed to have
changed not at all because of our actions and yet I felt completely different.
I kept seeing the woman’s face. I kept thinking about her eyes
    Did the medical school miss
the corpse? If so, they ignored it for fear of scandal. How many times a year
did it happen, I’ve always wondered, and for what variety of reasons?
    That night we returned to
the cove, and for three nights more. She remained preserved but she was still
dead. Nothing had happened. It appeared I could not bring her back to life, not
even for a moment. The softly hushing water that rocked her sargassum bed had
more life to it than she. Each time I entered a more depressed and numbed
state.
    “What’s her name, do you
think?” Lucius asked me on the third night.
    He was sitting on the
rocks, staring at her. The moonlight made her pale skin luminous against the
dark green.
    “She’s dead,” I said. “She
doesn’t have a name.”
    “But she had a name. And
parents. And maybe a husband. And now she’s here. Floating.”
    He laughed. It was a raw
laugh. I didn’t like what it contained.
    On the afternoon of the
first day, Lucius had been good-natured and joking. By the second, he had
become silent. Now he seemed to have lost