60

Sometimes I heard Richard’s voice.

Before I woke. He said my name, not calling me, speaking to me. He was here, beside me.

Look, he said. Look and see.

They keep the remains in a secret place. I stole into Dr. Opal’s office, pored through his computer files, solving each password, each code with little effort. They have hidden what is left of him, those spindles of charred kindling, his bones. And what is left of the mirror is somewhere in hiding.

The tallest structures in San Francisco are the pronged black skeletons that lift television up into the sky. Points of red blink off and on. The hills mature to summer blond. The fog never actually flows. It is suddenly there, a high tide parting around the peaks, the city, bursting without moving through the Golden Gate.

What has been joined can be separated, I believed, I would see him again.

I always had to pause, to take in the sight of traffic, the flashing red warning pedestrians to stay, people hurrying, ignoring the scarlet hand. People are all that holds the sky in place. The answers we give to each other, when asked how we are, what our day was like. This is what the stars can never equal, this glittering minutia, the subtle accidents of lives.

I passed along the streets, crossing in the crosswalk, turning my face from shop windows. Tonight I was late, and I wore my human habiliments, flesh, garments, with a certain impatience.

There was a moon, three quarters, high above. A narrow sidewalk was overshadowed by hyperextended stalks of geraniums, the plants needing more sun. I stopped and listened, sensing heartbeats.

There was nervousness in the air. It was going to happen again.

I had never liked the place, but Matilda had insisted. It reminded her of old times, meetings to rearrange, folders to be filed. I humored her, although I knew the game could not last.

Perhaps I liked it, too, despite myself. I eased myself into the chair. For weeks now I had lived out of the tidy suitcase of my two selves, unpacking Richard because I loved him, wearing him, with his memories, his chatter, because I could not suppress the fear that I would never see him again.

I put my hand, Richard’s hand, over the telephone. Matilda had insisted on a combination fax/answering machine. Matilda was loyal to certain products, Sony, Panasonic. She remained loyal to me the way I had once been, and I let her believe, thinking it harmless.

I called her number, her private line, and her Spanish accent answered. I can leave a message of any length, said her voice, and I enjoyed the sound, her voice turning a common English message into amber.

I left no message. I knew I could risk another phone call, because I had weeks ago learned how to steal past the computers that trace calls, slipping my voice like a thread through a needle’s eye.

Stella Cameron was breathless, picking up the phone just as I was about to hang up. “The baby just squirted mustard all over my instructions to the judge.”

“What case is that?” I heard Richard’s voice inquire.

“That awful date rape thing.”

I called her every now and then, and had come to think of her as a friend once again. It was one of my powers—I could transform shock and deep unease into their opposite. I wanted to ask Stella what was happening. What had she heard? What were the police about to do? Authorities were always raiding an elevator shaft in the Financial District at noon, storming a warehouse, digging up a vacant lot in Hunter’s Point. “I thought you didn’t do criminal stuff.”

“The defendant’s the obnoxious son of a college roommate,” she said, “a horrible kid. He has a reputation as a junior cocksman. The girlfriend should have known better.”

“That’s a shabby case, Stella,” I said. “I’m surprised at you.”

“You’re right. I’m not proud, Richard. I owed it to my friend.”

“You made copies, though,” I said. “Nothing is just one thing, unique. Everything is a photocopy of something else, hardcopy, a print-out.”

“They have these huge mustard containers at Costco with pump lids. You barely touch it and a long yellow noodle leaps out, except when you want it to.”

“You’re trying to stall me, get the call traced,” I said.

Stella sighed. “Christ, she’s starting to eat it. It might be good for her. Extra fiber.” She changed the subject, a habit of hers, quick switches, one of the many things I liked about her. “I don’t think Connie has a case.”

“Think of the publicity,” I said. “I can see the headlines—Wife Won’t Share Insurance with Dead Husband.”

“You know Connie. She loves a struggle. She still argues that you aren’t married because you’re legally dead.”

“Feeble argument, don’t you think?”

“You know what Dr. Opal says, don’t you?”

“Tell me.”

“He was over here a few nights ago. They watch everyone who ever knew you. They’re sick of it. I’m glad, in a way. I think the kind of person who wants to be a cop deserves to be punished.”

“What does Dr. Opal—”

“He says you must be Rebecca, disguised as Richard. That’s why they keep the bones hidden, top-secret. Maybe they’ll use them as bait some day.”

“What do you think?”

“I used to know you—Richard—pretty well, a long time ago. I think I loved you. I never told you that.” She paused, perhaps self-conscious, thinking of all of this going on tape, technicians listening. “I think you’re Richard Stirling.”

“New and improved,” I suggested.

She laughed. “You give me a headache, Richard. I hope they never find you.”

My parents are perfect in their deception. One might suppose they had been trained as spies. They have never seen me, they told anyone who asked. That room my father rents, that carpeted cellar with a piano, is a secret to everyone but my small family. The key is simplicity. Keep only one secret, and build a plain box around it.

Now Matilda was half an hour late.

I knew what was happening. This was the night it would unravel. This cellar room was painted green halfway up, and gray the rest of the way, with an acoustical-tile ceiling, squares filled with round little holes. A calendar was pinned to the wall, Crater Lake the image for April. A former tax accountant’s office, Matilda had said, comfortable and spartan at the same time.

Matilda thought of me as Richard Stirling, and as her old friend and employer she kept me supplied with gossip, and sometimes with a plastic tube of whole blood she had a relative misappropriate from the medical school. Some day, I had always known, they would follow Matilda here, or subvert her, convince her of the harm I was doing, persuade her that she owed too much to the living.

There was a step, the key, the background rush of sounds, traffic, far-off voices.

I knew at once, but I asked her a philosophical question, a legal quibble, and she was ready with an answer. “Of course you’re a person,” Matilda argued. “You can identify yourself, sign your name, bear witness. You can be sworn in under oath. You are of sound mind, and you can be fingerprinted. Legally, you are a human being.”

I took flowers from her arms, yellow roses, seven of them. “And medically?”

“Medically,” she said dismissively, as though the medical point of view was beneath notice. She was going to law school, and insisted some day Richard Stirling’s name would be on the letterhead with hers. “You’d need to find a doctor who would testify that you can be defined as alive despite what Connie’s expert might demonstrate. It would be very easy. There is nothing more compelling than an established fact, like a person standing up in person, here I am.”

I lay the roses on the desk, on the green blotter. I had to ask, to give her an opportunity.

“There were two in tennis shorts tonight,” she responded. “I lost them at Pier 39, by the clown selling helium balloons.”

Again, I offered her another chance to be truthful. “Did they give you these flowers?”

She hated the words as she spoke them. “I thought you would like them.”

“You don’t have to lie to me, Matilda,” I said. “Don’t be upset. They courted you for days, bought you dinner, gave you things. One of them is a bit of a romantic.”

“I am not lying,” she said, turning to me, her hands against the chair behind her. She was plumper than ever, and there was a wheeze of asthma in her voice.

I smiled. “They told you it would be so much better if they took me in. It was Dr. Opal. He’s very convincing. Maybe he fell a little bit in love with you. Yellow roses. It’s touching.”

“It isn’t true.”

I put my finger to my lips, telling her not to say another word.

She tried to say no, but she was fighting tears.

“Because they are right,” I said, “in their way. Don’t think for a moment that you have betrayed me. You haven’t. Whatever happens to me is an old story.”

The silence was the balancing point. Truth is all we have. In that is our strength, our lives. As soon as we begin to keep our secrets, as soon as we knit our fictions, the color drains, the stars pale, the land weakens beneath our feet.

Among the many things I missed, I missed drinking water, standing at a sink and filling a tumbler, like this plastic container here in the corner, emblazoned with a football player making a difficult catch, his body horizontal, suspended in the air. “Where are they?”

She steadied herself. “Just outside.”

“Can they hear us?”

Her eyes were bright. Anguish resembled some other emotion—wonderment, startled rapture. “They said it would hurt my career, my family—”

“I should not have put you in this position.”

“What will they do to you, Richard?”

“They won’t hurt you. They’re too frightened of me.”

She said, “They promised me they would protect you.”

And I could not help myself—I laughed.

“Don’t go out there, Richard,” she said.

I turned back with a smile. “Don’t you trust them?”

But I never knew what trap they would devise. I could never be certain. Each time I faced them there was danger. Even now I could smell gasoline, and the impatient sweat of men. It was the fire that made me want to stay where I was, behind walls. It was out there, explosive, waiting for me.