After Silence

I saw a buzzer for the nurse and shakily got hold of it. I moved my head too fast and suddenly the pain dog growled loud.

“Well, hello, Mr. Fischer! You’re back on earth with us, huh? How’re you feeling?”

“Happy to still be around. Can you tell me what happened? But please go slow, I’m not really here yet.”

“Sure. The police found your car all banged up and went lookin’ for you. They found you down an embankment and you were unconscious. We thought you might have a bad concussion or a skull fracture along with those cuts, but they did a scan and didn’t find anything. You’re sounding pretty good now. What the heck happened out there?”

I sighed to give myself time, then realized a lie wasn’t necessary because most of the truth would do for now. I told her a stranger had forced me off the road and at gunpoint made me go over the embankment with him. Once there, he started hitting me until… I couldn’t say more and she didn’t press it.

“It’s so crazy, so scary these days. Sometimes I get scared just going out of the house to buy some milk. My husband told me—” She would have gone on, only a state policeman walked into the room and asked if we might be alone for a while. She took off. Sitting down on the chair next to my bed, he took out a notepad.

I told him the same story, and with a few specific questions here and there, he appeared satisfied. He was particularly interested in what the assailant looked like. I described a man in his early thirties, nondescript, but with a surprisingly deep voice. I thought it best to add one memorable characteristic so this fantasy attacker sounded more real. No, I had never seen him before. No idea why he would want to hurt me. I said who I was, and when asked why I was in New Jersey, I said business. The cop was a nice guy, friendly and sympathetic. He shook his head often, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened. When I was finished, he asked me to sign a form and said it wouldn’t be necessary to meet again unless I had questions. As he was leaving, I touched his arm and asked how long I had been in the hospital. Checking his watch, he said ten hours. Ten hours! I could barely keep from shouting. Ten hours! What had Lincoln done in that time? All the possibilities were horrible.

Alone again, I eased myself up to the side of the bed and picked up the telephone. It was difficult but I talked the hospital operator into placing a long-distance call to our home in Los Angeles. What time was it there? It didn’t matter. The phone rang and rang. Pick it up. Pick up the damned phone!

“Hello?”

“Hello, Lily? Lily, it’s Max—”

“Max, Jesus Christ, where are you? It’s Mary.”

“Who?” I couldn’t understand. Why hadn’t Lily picked it up?

“Mary. It’s me, Mary Poe. Max, for God’s sake, wherever you are, get home. Lincoln’s dead, Max. He hung himself. Lily came in and found him. Max, are you there? Do you hear me? Lincoln is dead.”

My clothes were in the closet. There was a mirror on the inside of the closet door with a small lamp over it. I turned it on and looked at myself for the first time in ten hours. My face was as bad as my fingers had said, but I’d seen worse-looking people at bus stops in Los Angeles. The pain dog was bellowing as I slowly dressed. I left three hundred dollars on the table next to the bed, along with a note saying if that wasn’t enough to send the bill to me in California.

I opened the door to the room, saw no one in the hall, and walked out. Luckily there was a door that opened onto a large garden. Outside smelled of good fresh things and made me want to cry. It was evening. I walked on cobblestones across the garden and then through some high hedges into the hospital parking lot. A taxi had dropped someone off at the front door and was just pulling away when I flagged it down and got in.

“Hey, you’re lucky. I was almost out of here. Where to?” The driver looked in the rearview mirror and his eyes widened. “Holy cow! What happened to you?”

“Car accident. Would you please take me to Newark Airport?”

“You sure you’re all right? I mean, it’s okay to travel and all?”

“Yes, please just go to the airport.”

Hanged himself. It was absolutely the crudest, most brilliant thing he could have done. What had he said back there? “I’m no cartoon.” Did he say that? Yes, something like that. But now this and it was so hideously perfect that nothing in the world could have been more effective. I was certain he had done it somewhere in the house where Lily would have been sure to find him. Lily or Greer.

“Greer. Oh God.”

“You say something?”

“No, nothing.”

The driver looked at me in the mirror and shook his head. My carry-on bag was next to me on the seat in the dark. I reached into it and felt around for the sketchbook and a pencil. Flipping the cover over, I put the pencil to the paper and began to draw. Except for the streetlights and the occasional car headlights flicking over us, it was utterly dark in the back of the taxi. But I drew and drew, never looking down, only feeling the pencil scratching across paper, doing whatever my hand felt like doing. I drew until we arrived at the airport, where I left the book and pencil on the seat and got out to catch a plane home.

There was a film on the flight. The stewardess gave me a set of earphones but I left them in my lap. It was better to watch without any sound, making up dialogue in my head, guessing the plot as it skittered silently along. Anything to fill my mind.

A very beautiful blond woman has the world in her hip pocket, money, power, a handsome boyfriend who seems to love her as much as the rest of the world does. But she grows tired of it all. One day she meets an enormously fat man who works as a cashier at a supermarket. They talk, she laughs, they talk some more. The next shot is of her waiting for him out in the parking lot after work. He comes out of the store and sees her there, a blond Venus leaning on her red sports car, obviously waiting for him. Cut to his face. His eyes roll up in his head and he faints.

As the film got worse, I became more and more involved. I put on the earphones and turned them way up. The couple must fight the whole world to prove their love is real. Every cliché you could think of was in the film. Her rich parents are outraged, her once nifty boyfriend turns out to be a cad who does whatever he can to break the lovebirds up. They almost part, but true love wins out.

Probably one of the sillier films I’d seen in my life, but I laughed at the lame jokes, sat forward on my seat when things looked bad for them. At the end, when they are off in an idyllic Vermont town ru

I got the car from the parking lot and drove toward town. I’d been gone a little over twenty-four hours, but the only thing left in the world that was the same for me was this road with the orange lights above and the familiar billboards for airlines, hotels, weekend package trips to Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe. When I passed the gas station where the cashier looked at you through binoculars, I thought of stopping and asking him through all his thick protective glass: Remember me? Forget how I look now; I was the one who offered you a twenty last night and made no trouble. Last night when things were only full of dangerous possibilities. Not like now with my purple split face and dead future.