Winter 2007 Read Online Free PDF Page B

balance, when they’ve entered into a place
from which there is no escape?
    The old man knows, I’m
sure. He has perspective. But the rest of them, they have no idea what awaits
them.
    ***
    For another week I went to
her nightly, and each time the hand reached toward me like some luminous,
five-petaled flower, grasping toward the moon. There was no other progress.
Slowly, my hopes and daydreams turned to sleeplessness and despair. My studies
suffered and I stammered upon questioning like a first year who couldn’t
remember the difference between a ligament and a radial artery. My friends
stared at me and muttered that I worked too hard, that my brain had gone soft
from overstudy. But I saw nothing but the woman’s eyes, even when Lucius,
without warning, while I was visiting her, moved out of our quarters. Leaving
me alone.
    I understood this, to some
extent. I had become a bad roommate and, worse, a liability. But when Lucius
began avoiding me in the halls, then I knew he had intuited I had gone farther,
gone against his advice.
    Finally, at the end of an
anatomy class, I cornered him. He looked at me as if I were a stranger.
    “I need you to come down to
the water with me,” I said.
    “Why?” he said. “What’s the
point?”
    “You need to see.”
    “What have you done?”
    From Lucius’ tone you would
have thought I’d murdered someone.
    “You just need to see.
Please? For a friend?”
    He gave me a contemptuous
look, but said, “I’ll meet you tonight. But I won’t go down there with you. We
meet there and leave separately.”
    “Thank you Lucius. Thank
you so much.”
    I was so desperately
grateful. I had been living with this secret in my head for almost a week. I
hadn’t been bathing. I hadn’t been eating. When I did sleep, I dreamt of
snow-white hands reaching for me from the sea. Hundreds of them, melting into
the water.
    ***
    I no longer think of my
parents’ bungalow as a trap. It’s more of a solace—all of their things
surround me. I can almost conjure them up from the smells alone. There is so
much history here, of so many good things.
    From the window, I can see
the old man now. He seems restless, searching. Once or twice, he looked like he
might come to the door, but he retreated and walked back onto the beach.
    If I did talk to him, I
don’t know where I’d begin my story. I don’t know if I’d wait for him to tell
his or if mine would come out all in a mad rush, and there he’d be, still on
the welcome mat, looking at this crazy old man, knowing he’d made a mistake.
    ***
    Lucius at the water’s edge
that night. Lucius bent over in a crouch, staring at the miracle, the atrocity
my lantern’s light had brought to both of us. Lucius making a sound like a
crow’s harsh caw.
    “It’s like the movement of
a starfish arm after you cut it off,” he said. “It’s no different from any
corpse that flinches under the knife. Muscle memory.”
    “She’s coming back to
life,” I said.
    Lucius stood, walked over
to me, and slapped me hard across the face. I reeled back, fell to one knee by
the water’s edge. It hurt worse than anything but the look in the woman’s eyes.
    Lucius leaned down to hiss
in my ear: “This is an abomination. A mistake. You must let it go—into
the sea. Or burn it. Or both. You must get rid of this, do you understand? For
both of our sakes. And if you don’t, I will come back down here and do it for
you. Another thing: we’re no longer friends. That can no longer be. I do not
know you anymore.” And, more softly: “You must understand. You must. This cannot
be.”
    I nodded but I could not
look at him. In that one whisper, my whole world had collapsed and been
re-formed. Lucius had been my best friend; I had just not been his best friend.
He was leaving me to my fate.
    As I stood, I felt utterly
alone. All I had left was the woman.
    I looked out at her, so
unbelievably beautiful floating atop the sargassum.
    “I don’t even know your
name,” I