A Better Angel Read online

  “You’re not allowed to be playing that piano,” he said.

  “Yeah, right,” said Bonnie. “Whatever.” She launched into “Chopsticks.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to stop that.”

  “If you want me to stop, you’re going to have to shoot me,” said Bonnie.

  “Maybe we should be going,” said Denis.

  “I’m enjoying myself,” said Bonnie. “Is it a crime to enjoy yourself in a hospital? Are people allowed only to suffer and die here?” She began to play “Für Elise.” The guard peered at their nametags and made notes in a small black book.

  “We’re on our way,” said Denis, pulling at Bonnie’s arm.

  “I’ll have to file an incident report,” the guard said.

  “File away!” said Bonnie. She felt giddy. Perhaps it was the after-effect of having Denis in her arms, or of being next to him.

  “I’ll see you up in the lab,” said Denis. He got up and walked away. She stopped playing and walked after him.

  “Wait!” she said. “Let’s go find the food cart.” The guard walked away, thinking of all the patients wanting their sleep. Beatrice remained on top of the piano. She lay on her back and looked up all the way to the top of the atrium, seven stories up. She saw people walking by occasionally, along the balconies, carrying blood to the lab or moving a patient. She saw the beautiful Filipino woman who worked in the dietary department wheeling the third-shift food cart along the balcony and eating a candy bar.

  She closed her eyes and imagined all her friends from the lab standing spread out on all the different levels and balconies while she herself floated above the piano. She imagined them calling out to one another: Olivia to Otto, Otto to Denis, Denis to her, she to Luke, Luke to Bonnie, and Bonnie to Denis.

  When she returned to the lab, Beatrice found it in chaos. The respite they’d been enjoying was over, and things were very busy again. She sat in the window and watched Luke as he rushed around, looking hapless.

  He felt lost in a rush of fluid. They were getting tests now not just for blood but for urine, and CSF, and all manner of effusions. Nursing assistants came and dumped specimens in great quantities at the window. There were even small pieces of people coming up now, discrete bits of organ or tumor to be processed and frozen for a pathologist to look at in the morning. Someone dropped off a whole human brain in a Tupperware container full of formaldehyde.

  And there was much stool, most of it quite runny, packaged in blue plastic containers that looked to Luke a lot like the containers in which delis packaged their potato salad. In the hurry to get things done, he dropped one. He was acutely grateful that it didn’t break open on the floor. Instead it bounced and rolled, coming to rest nestled against Olivia’s shoe.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “That’s okay.” Olivia had another moment of perversity in which she imagined picking up the container and throwing its soupy contents all over Luke, and all over the walls and windows of the lab, all the while shouting, “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  “I’m getting very tired,” she said.

  “Tell me about it,” he said. Much time had passed, though Luke barely noticed. It was almost five. He could go home at six. They all could, but he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. He wondered if one day he and Bonnie might leave together and go to his apartment. Otto wandered up from the chemistry lab.

  “Make it stop,” he said. “I don’t want to work anymore.”

  “I think it’s slowing down,” said Luke.

  “Where’s Bonnie?” Otto asked, sitting down at one of the empty terminals.

  “In the back,” said Olivia. “With Denis.” It was a quality of her perpetually sweaty palms that they made a sucking sound when ground together and rapidly pulled apart. She made those sounds now, and winked. In fact, Bonnie was only helping Denis do differential cell counts. He had forgiven her for causing a scene, and she had been so bold as to make plans with him for later in the day.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Luke. He walked out of the lab, down the hall, and into the men’s bathroom. Beatrice followed right behind. She watched him at the urinal, craning her head around his side to get a glimpse of his penis. It was not very exciting, and she realized with a very mild sort of sadness that she did not really desire him physically. Rather, she dreamed of haunting him, of climbing unseen and unfelt into his single bed at night, of lying there on him and in him and by him while he gazed at the two-by-four-foot hole in his ceiling where the plaster had fallen down one night. He had woken with a start when it fell near the foot of the bed.

  She leaned against the sink while he washed his face, then watched him stare into his own eyes in the mirror. Putting her face next to his, and staring where he stared, she could hear perfectly what he was thinking. It was, What’s wrong with me?

  When Luke and Beatrice left the bathroom, the phlebotomists were arriving. Luke continued back to the lab, but Beatrice stopped to watch them pass. Every morning she came up to watch the arrival. It was like a parade. They came down the hall in twos and threes, some with their arms around each other, some having recently left the same bed. Their names were Alan, Elaine, Wendy, Randy, Eric, Arthur, Phuong, Louisa, Amanda, Loric, Oliver, Nathan, and Elizabeth. Beatrice thought they were all very pretty, especially Oliver, who had a humongous head and beautiful pale skin that was always pink and vibrant-looking from the cold when he arrived. He looked to Beatrice like the sort of boy who drank great quantities of milk.

  She liked to smell them, because each one wore a different cologne or perfume. Some days she spent her whole morning following them around as they slipped in and out of patients’ rooms, drawing blood. But she would not do that today.

  Today she waited patiently at the window and watched her friends as they finished up their work. She waited an hour before everyone was ready to go. It was customary for them all to go out to breakfast together. Otto suggested a pancake house. Everyone said that was a fine idea except Luke, who said he was too tired to eat and started off down the hall. Beatrice did not follow him right away. She paused to watch her other friends walk off together in the opposite direction. She sent a prayer after them.

  Let it happen this way, she said, gathering up her hair and waving it at them as if that might make what she wanted for them so. Let it be that Olivia and Otto encounter in each other something lovely, and Denis and Bonnie inspire each other’s joy, and let something nice happen to Luke.

  She knelt in an attitude of supplication and willed joy on her friends. In her mind’s eye she could see the future as she desired it to be: Denis and Bonnie kissing in the bitter cold inside her car while they waited for the engine to warm; Otto and Olivia rubbing their feet together as they watched a movie in his apartment, and falling asleep with their heads touching and their breath on each other’s faces. But for Luke she could imagine nothing.

  Beatrice hurried after him, catching up as he was walking down the hill toward the river and the bus stop. The hospital grounds were beautifully landscaped, complete with a small wood that extended to the river. Snow was everywhere on the ground and trees, and still falling thinly. It was very cold. Luke had moved from Louisiana. He thought, on his way down the wooded hill, of his parents’ house, and of his old bedroom. An ambulance wailed by him, going to pick someone up. He began to cry, but stopped by the time he reached the bus stop.

  There was a girl there, huddled in a big coat, reading by the light of the streetlamps. She gave him a sullen look and turned back to her magazine. Luke sat down as far from her as he could. Beatrice sat next to him and considered trying to hold his hand. Luke closed his eyes and thought, for no reason he could think of, of the hole in his ceiling. He had still not cleaned up the plaster. He heard laughter.

  Opening his eyes, he saw a woman coming toward him. She was dressed in a black shirt and white pants, and looked to him as if she had been out dancing. Her makeup was smeared on her face. He noticed, when she came near, that she reeked
of booze.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Pardon me.” She was no one he knew.

  “Yes,” he said. He looked at her hair. It was all messy, but he could tell that it had at some recent time been elaborately styled.

  “Can you help me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. There was little concern in his voice.

  “I’m really bleeding,” she said. “I just got my period, and I’m sort of without supplies. You know? Do you have any?”

  “I think you should ask her,” he said, indicating the reading girl with his head. The girl raised her head and looked at them briefly, then ignored them.

  “I did. No luck. Have you got some tissues? A hankie? Anything?”

  “Sorry,” said Luke. He wanted her to go away.

  “It’s really bad,” she said.

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Well,” she said, touching her white pants, “am I spotting? Can you at least tell me that? I can’t bend over enough to see. I think I’d fall. I’m not myself right now.” Luke met her eyes for a moment. They were blue. He looked down at her crotch.

  The woman burst out laughing. “Made you look!” she said. Nearby a man was laughing, too. Luke saw him step out of a shadow. The woman went to him, saying, “Told you I could make him look!” She put her arm around him, and they began to stagger off. Luke looked at the girl with the magazine. She was smiling. He stood up and moved his hands from his jacket pockets to his pants pockets, looking away from her. His face was hot. There was something in his pocket. He took it out.

  It was the blue-topped tube that Denis had been missing. Luke had sworn he did not know where it was when Denis asked him, but now he remembered picking it up when Olivia forgot it on a counter. The blood in the tube was dark but not clotted. He held it in his bare hand. It was warm, from being next to his leg. With his thumb he worked the stopper free, then began to run after the woman and her friend. When he was close enough, he splattered it liberally over their necks and backs. The woman touched her hand to the back of her neck and brought it forward to look at it. When she saw the blood, she screamed loud enough to startle winter birds away from the telephone wires where they perched and sang.

  “There!” Luke shouted. “There!” The man came forward and punched him square in the face. Luke fell down on the snowy sidewalk, where the man kicked him once in the head, then walked away with his friend, trying to console her. The magazine girl got up to wait for her bus at the next stop.

  Beatrice sat down next to Luke. He was staring, unblinking, up into the dawning sky. He felt strangely content lying there, and she was worried for him. She felt overcome by something. When she saw him falling back with blood spraying from his nose, love swelled in her like a sponge so she felt heavy for the first time since she’d awoken in the hospital. She reached out to him.

  Though he could feel it when she stroked his forehead, he thought it was just a breeze. When she bent down and kissed him, he thought it was a twitch in his lip, possibly the result of brain damage from the kick to his head.

  As she kissed him she had a vision of becoming his spirit wife. In time, she knew now, he would come to feel her and see her and know her. It would be as if she weren’t even dead. The kiss itself, the contact, was thrilling. How could I have left this? she wondered, and she bent down to do it again.

  But even as she kissed him, a sharp, clear note sounded in her head, and she knew with exquisite certainty that they had at last harvested her heart from her chest. It was on its way now to someone who needed it and wanted it. As her heart was taken, the veil obscuring her memory was lifted and she recalled with perfect clarity the motivation for her leap. As the last quantities of blood drained from her heart, she stood up and threw out her arms, as if in benediction to the whole winter landscape.

  Finished! she cried, and ran off across the street and over the bridge. Halfway across she took off, went up and away, in search of a place without loneliness and desire; without misery and rage, without disappointment; without crushing, impenetrable sadness.

  STAB

  Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood. We found them in the road outside our houses, and from far away they looked like the victims of careless drivers, but close up you saw that they were plump and round, not flat, and that their bodies were marred by clean-edged rectangular stab wounds. Sometimes they lay in drying pools of blood, and you knew the murder had occurred right there. Other times it was obvious they had been moved from the scene of the crime, and arranged in postures, like the two squirrels posed in a hug on Mrs. Chenoweth’s doorstep.

  Squirrels, then rabbits, then the cats, and dogs in late summer. By then I had known for a long time who was doing all the stabbing. I discovered the identity of the murderer on the first day of June, in the summer of 1979, two years and one month and fourteen days after my brother’s death from cancer. I got up early that morning, a sunny one that broke a chain of rainy days, because my father was taking me to see Spider-Man, who was scheduled to make an appearance at the fourth annual Leukemia Society of America Summer Fair in Washington, D.C. I was eight years old and I thought Spider-Man was very important.

  In the kitchen I ate a bowl of cereal while my father spread the paper out before me. “Look at that,” he said. On the front page was an article detailing the separation of Siamese twin girls, Lisa and Elisa Johansen from Salt Lake City. They were joined at the thorax, like my brother and I had been, but they shared vital organs, whereas Colm and I never did. There was a word for the way we and they had been joined: thoracopagus. It was still the biggest word I knew.

  “Isn’t that amazing?” my father said. He was a surgeon, so these sorts of things interested him above all others. “See that? They’re just six months old!” Colm and I were separated at one and a half years. I had no clear memories of either the operation or the attachment, though Colm always claimed he remembered our heads knocking together all the time, and that he dreamed of monkeys just before we went under from the anesthesia. The Johansen twins were joined side by side, but my brother and I were joined back to back. Our parents would hold up mirrors so we could look at each other—that was something I did remember: looking in my mother’s silver-handled mirror, over my shoulder at my own face.

  Early as it was, on our way out to the car we saw our new neighbor sitting on the front steps of her grandparents’ house, reading a book in the morning sun.

  “Hello, Molly,” said my father.

  “Good morning, Dr. Cole,” she said. She was unfailingly polite with adults. At school she was already very popular, though she had only been there for two months, and she had a tendency to oppress the other children with her formidable vocabulary.

  “Poor girl,” said my father when we were in the car and on our way. He pitied her because both her parents had died in a car accident. She was in the car with them when they crashed, but she was thrown from the wreck through an open window—this was in Florida, where I supposed everyone always drove around with their windows down and never wore seat belts.

  I turned in my seat so I was upside down. This had always been my habit; I did it so I could look out the window at the trees and telephone wires as we passed them. My mother would never stand for it, but she was flying a trip to San Francisco. She was a stewardess. Once my father and I flew with her while she was working and she brought me a glass of Coke with three cherries in it. She put down the drink and leaned over me to open up the window shade, which I had kept closed, from the beginning of the flight, out of fear. “Look,” she said to me. “Look at all that!” I looked and saw sandy mountains that looked like crumpled brown paper bags. I imagined falling from that great height into my brother’s arms.

  “Spider-Man!” said my father, after we had pulled onto route 50, and had passed a sign that said, WASHINGTON, D.C., 29 MILES. “Aren’t you excited?” He reached over and rubbed my head with his fist. If it had been just me and my mother, she would not have spoken at all,
but my father spoke the whole way, talking about Spider-Man, talking about the mall, talking about the Farrah Fawcett look-alike who was also scheduled to appear, asking me every time if the prospect of seeing such things didn’t make me excited, though he knew I would not answer him. I hadn’t spoken a word or uttered a sound since my brother’s funeral.

  Spider-Man was a great disappointment. When my father brought me close to him for an autograph, I saw how his uniform was badly sewn, and glossy in a gross sort of way, and his voice, when he said, “Hey there, Spider-Fan,” was pitched high like a little mouse’s voice. I knew he was an utter fake, and I only wanted to get away from him. I ran away, across the mall, and my father did not catch me until I had made it all the way to the Smithsonian Castle. He didn’t yell at me. It only made him sad when I acted so peculiarly. My mother sometimes lost her temper and would scream out that I was a twisted little fruitcake and why couldn’t I ever make anything easy? She always apologized later, but never with the same ferocity, and so it seemed to me not to count, and I always hoped she would burst into my room later on in the night, to wake me by screaming how sorry she was, to slap herself, and maybe me, too, because she was so regretful.

  “So much for Spider-Man,” said my father. He took me to see the topiary buffalo, and for a while we sat in the grass, saying nothing, until he asked me if I wouldn’t go back with him. I did, and though we had missed the Farrah Fawcett look-alike’s rendition of “Feelings,” he got to meet her, because he had connections with the Society. She said I was cute and gave me an autographed picture that I later gave to my father because I could tell he wanted it.

  When we got home I went up to my room and tossed all my Spider-Man comic books and figurines into the deepest recesses of my closet. Then I took a book out onto the roof. I sat and read Stuart Little for the fifth time. Below me, in the yard next door, I could see Molly Pitcher playing, just as silent as I was. Every once in a while she would look up and catch me looking at her, and she would smile down at her plastic dolls. We had interacted like this before, me reading and her playing, but on this day, for some reason, she spoke to me. She held my gaze for a few moments, then laughed coyly and said, “Would you like to see my bodkin?” I shrugged, then climbed down and followed her when she went into the ravine behind our houses. I did not know what a bodkin was. I thought she was going to make me look inside her panties, like Judy Corcoran, who lived two doors down, had done about three weeks before, trying to make me swear not to tell about the boring thing I had seen.