(clarity)
And what of myth? What of destiny’s rising tide that swells and crests and sweeps us to its titanheights before dashing us upon the reef? Maybe I believed the storm had already broken. Maybe I thought we’d been sufficiently tossed and battered and were now lying, grateful for our very lives, on the shore. As if myth might engulf the lives of mortals and then simply recede. As if myth might relent!
I took the cordless phone up to my bedroom and called the frat house. A girl answered, promised to get Bruce for me, and hung up.
I called again, and she answered again. “Leave it off the hook,” I reminded her, but I knew she was probably too drunk to stay on task. It was the telephone on the GBC kitchen wall, right next to the screen door. I could hear the rusty spring shrieking as people went in and out. I listened to the party noises there, and here at Raghurst—on the phone were baritone laughter and the jackhammer bass of a dance track; downstairs were the shouts of dancing women and Tori Amos on the stereo.
After a minute a male voice came on the line. “What’s aaaap?” it drawled.
“It’s an emergency,” I tried. “Can you get Bruce Comfort? This is his sister.”
There were a few more minutes of background party noises, and then someone hung up the phone again.
I was very patient. It had begun to feel like a game. Like a quest. I lay down on my bed and dialed again, went through the emergency routine again. This time it was only a short wait; he must have been close to the kitchen.
“Hey,” Bruce’s voice said.
“Hooray!” I said.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Karen Huls. Can you please come and take me away?”
“From where?”
“My house. You remember. You picked Mike up here, at Halloween.”
“Are you okay?” he said.
“Pretty high,” I confessed.
Bruce laughed. “I don’t think I should fetch you to the frat house, Karen.”
“No, no,” I agreed. “And I don’t think we can stay here at my house, either. We’ll have to go someplace new.”
“Hell, why not,” Bruce said. “I’m on my way.”
I went downstairs to find my shirt, but Raghurst’s living and dining rooms were too crowded with nude women dancing, and there were too many other shirts and skirts and pants and bras and panties strewn over the floor and draped over the chairs and piled on the dining table. As I wound through the throng, women hugged me. Women kissed me on the mouth. Women slapped me on the back. Women cheered and whistled. Women called out my name.
Someone must have tried to let in some air, because the patio door had gotten jammed again. It stood six inches open to the winter night, listing off its track and running with condensation. Dyann was sitting out there on the deck railing, all alone, looking off across the yard. For a second I thought I’d mistaken her for someone else, but they were her dreadlocks, her broad shoulders and bare breasts, her high-bridged nose in profile. It was her expression that threw me. I’d never seen that look before, and I squeezed out through the gap to get a closer look at her face.
She turned, and I shivered with the strangeness as much as the cold. Her lips were parted a little, her eyes wide, her gaze soft. It wasn’t so much something new on her face as something missing. Some surety, some conviction, had been torn away.
Lost. That was it: Dyann Brooks-Morriss looked lost. “What’s wrong?” I said.
“They just … They threw me out.”
“Who?”
“Them.” Dyann jerked her head at the house. “That lynch mob in there.”
That lynch mob loves me, I thought. “They can’t throw you out of your own house, Dyann.”
“Not the house. The Women’s Center. Melanie just told me they’re booting me out of the Women’s Center. They’re releasing a statement ‘officially condemning my actions,’ she said.”
“Well, you’re going to be expelled anyways, right? So you can’t really keep your Women’s Center membership.”
Dyann was silent. No snappy comeback, no sharp retort.
I wrapped my arms across my chest. The deck was encrusted with ice, and we were both in bare feet. “Come on, let’s go back inside.”
“You go ahead,” she said. “I can’t fit through there. I tried to close the door behind me and it got stuck.”
“So we’ll go around front. Come on. You can’t stay out here.”
Dyann bit her lip. “They’re like a pack of wild animals.”
“Well, Dyann, that’s exactly what you wanted.”
She looked at me. “I wanted to organize. I wanted to act.”
“You wanted chaos,” I said. “‘Bellum omnium in omnes,’ remember?”
There was shouting from inside. I heard my name. I heard Bruce Comfort’s voice.
“Oh, shit,” I said. Blurry bare limbs flashed through the fogged-up doors. I moved to the opening to see, Dyann’s cold flesh pressing in behind me.
Bruce was coming through the house toward me, toward the jammed doors. He was trying to elbow his way through the women, but some of the women were shrieking at him, crowding and jostling and shoving him. Bruce looked scared.
“What is he doing here?” someone hollered.
“Rapist!” someone screamed.
“Get out, you pig!” someone shrieked.
It happened so fast. The women pushed in on Bruce and some reached out and clawed at his hoodie and his belt and his hair. He tried to back away but they pressed in around him as one naked writhing mass of limbs and hands clutching and tearing and shoving each other and shoving Bruce until he stumbled, or flung himself, or was thrown, violently forward.
“Watch out!” somebody cried. There was screaming.
I flinched back from the gap just as Bruce’s body struck the patio door and exploded out, onto the deck, in a shower of flying glass. He slammed into Dyann and me with such force that all three of us telegraphed straight across the ice, shot under the deck railing, and landed in the snowdrift five feet below.
Amid the tangle of us in the deck’s shadow, I thought at first my arm had been severed. I’d hit my head, and a solid weight crushed my thigh and my stomach, but the sharpest pain was just below my elbow. My chest flooded with hot liquid from what I thought must be the stump of my severed arm.
If all this blood is your blood you’ll be dead soon. If not not. The logic was simple as a shrug. It was the same quiet, detached voice that had come to me when I was pinned to the gold car, but now it had burrowed itself even deeper inside my brain. It had walled itself off. It had no interest whatsoever in the screaming careening limbstruggle taking place in the snow.
I lifted my other hand and felt hair. I heard a thick bubbling sound, a spraying. I felt a hot spray across my belly. It was Bruce, lying on top of me.
“Fuck,” said Dyann, up on her elbow beside us, “Oh. Oh, fuck.”
Bruce rolled a little and slid partway off me, into the snow. The top of his head wedged itself into my armpit. I wriggled to escape, scraping my bare back along the snow, but we were on an incline and I couldn’t get any traction.
“Karen. Oh, Karen, look,” Dyann said.
Bruce’s face was pierced all over with glass. Pieces of glass glittered in his cheek, his forehead. A shard protruded from his eye. But worse than that was his throat: A jagged fragment as long as my hand was lodged sideways in Bruce’s neck. The wound bubbled. Red blood burbled and fountained as he coughed.
I reached over him, thinking to stanch the flow somehow, but my fingers nudged the glass and it tipped sideways from the wound, onto my ribs. The blood came faster, pumping now in a rhythm, spraying and gurgling when Bruce breathed.
My fingers slipped and scrabbled at his throat. “Dyann,” I said, “help me with this. I can’t move my arm.”
The waterlogged breaths stopped, but Dyann lifted her hand and placed it over mine, pressing flat. The blood welled up between our fingers. I felt the pulse weaken, and then it stopped altogether. Dyann’s head came down heavy on my shoulder.
The others came, screaming, from all sides. They looked down from the railing, circled around behind us, crowded in on both sides. Someone dropped a blanket down on us. Sirens wailed, and the paramedics ordered everyone away. They shone flashlights. They pulled Bruce clear of me, farther out into the yard, and did some CPR on his body there in the snow while everyone watched. Wherever the flashlights struck, Bruce’s flesh was liquid, inert, the red blood dulling as it cooled.
I kept twisting and reaching around to see, frustrated when my limbs wouldn’t cooperate, and they kept telling me to lie still while they felt through all the blood for injuries. “I’m good, I feel good,” I assured them. “I can’t feel a thing, except my arm hurts.”
“It’s the snow numbing you,” they told me. “You have some serious lacerations in your legs and back.”
Finally they lifted me onto one stretcher and Dyann onto another, and carried us out of the backyard to separate ambulances. She was concussed, they told me. And because I wouldn’t stop asking, they told me that Bruce Comfort was dead.