Sole Survivor

‘Not madness. Not suicide. Murder. But how in the name of God did you survive?’

‘I ran.’

‘While they were still being killed?’

‘Charlie and Georgine were already dead. Lisa was still burn­ing.’

‘So she wasn’t dead yet when you ran?’

‘No. Still on her feet and burning but not screaming, just quietly quietly burning.’

‘Then you got out just in time. A miracle of your own.’

‘How, Rose? How was it done to them?’

Lowering her gaze from his eyes to their entwined hands, she didn’t answer Joe’s question. More to herself than to him, she said, ‘I thought this was the way to begin the work - by bringing the news to the families who’d lost loved ones on that airliner. But because of me . . . all this blood.’

‘You really were aboard Flight 353?’ he asked.

She met his eyes again. ‘Economy class. Row sixteen, seat B, one away from the window.’

The truth was in her voice as sure as rain and sunshine are in a green blade of grass.

Joe said, ‘You really walked away from the crash unharmed.’

‘Untouched,’ she said softly, emphasizing the miraculousness of her escape.

And you weren’t alone.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Not the Delmanns. Not anyone else you’ve spoken with. They have all kept faith with you, held tight to whatever secrets you’ve told them. How I found out goes all the way back to that night. Do you remember Jeff and Mercy Ealing?’

A faint smile floated across her mouth and away as she said, ‘The Loose Change Ranch.’

‘I was there early this afternoon,’ he said.

‘They’re nice people.’

‘A lovely quiet life.’

‘And you’re a good reporter.’

‘When the assignment matters to me.’

Her eyes were midnight-dark but luminous lakes, and Joe could not tell whether the secrets sunk in them would drown or buoy him.

She said, ‘I’m so sorry about all the people on that plane. Sorry they went before their time. So sorry for their families. . . for you.’

‘You didn’t realize that you were putting them in jeopardy —did you?’

‘God, no.’

‘Then you’ve no guilt.’

‘I feel it, though.

‘Tell me, Rose. Please. I’ve come a long, long way around to hear it. Tell me what you’ve told the others.’

‘But they’re killing everyone I tell. Not just the Delmanns but others, half a dozen others.’

‘I don’t care about the danger.’

‘But I care. Because now I do know the jeopardy I’m putting you in, and I’ve got to consider it.’

‘No jeopardy. None whatsoever. I’m dead anyway,’ he said. ‘Unless what you have to tell me is something that gives me a life again.’

‘You’re a good man. In all the years you have left, you can contribute so much to this screwed up world.’

‘Not in my condition.’

Her eyes, those lakes, were sorrow given substance. Suddenly they scared him so profoundly that he wanted to look away from them — but could not.

Their conversation had given him time to approach the question from which at first he’d cringed, and now he knew that he must ask it before he lost his courage again. ‘Rose. . . Where is my daughter, Nina?’

Rose Tucker hesitated. Finally, with her free hand, she reached into an inner pocket of her navy-blue blazer and withdrew a Polaroid photograph.

Joe could see that it was a picture of the flush-set headstone with the bronze plaque bearing the names of his wife and daughters —one of those she had taken the previous day.

With a squeeze of encouragement, she let go of his hand and pressed the photograph into it.

Staring at the Polaroid, he said, ‘She’s not here. Not in the ground. Michelle and Chrissie, yes. But not Nina.’

Almost in a whisper, she said, ‘Open your heart, Joe. Open your heart and your mind — and what do you see?’

At last she was bringing to him the transforming gift that she had brought to Nora Vadance, to the Delmanns, and to others.

He stared at the Polaroid.

‘What do you see, Joe?’

‘A gravestone.’

‘Open your mind.’

With expectations that he could not put into words but that nevertheless caused his heart to race, Joe searched the image in his hand. ‘Granite, bronze . . . the grass around.’

‘Open your heart,’ she whispered.

‘Their three names . . . the dates .

‘Keep looking.’

‘...sunshine . . . shadows..

‘Open your heart.’

Although Rose’s sincerity was evident and could not be doubted, her little mantra — Open your mind, open your heart — began to seem silly, as though she were not a scientist but a New Age guru.

‘Open your mind,’ she persisted gently.

The granite. The bronze. The grass around.

She said, ‘Don’t just look. See.’

The sweet milk of expectation began to curdle, and Joe felt his expression turning sour.

Rose said, ‘Does the photo feel strange to you? Not to your eyes . . . to your fingertips? Does it feel peculiar against your skin?’

He was about to tell her no, that it felt like nothing more than what it was, like a damned Polaroid, glossy and cool — but then it did feel peculiar.

First he became conscious of the elaborate texture of his own skin to an extent that he had never before experienced or imagined possible. He felt every arch, loop, and whorl as it pressed against the photo, and each tiny ridge and equally tiny trough of skin on each finger pad seemed to have its own exquisitely sensitive array of nerve endings.

More tactile data flowed to him from the Polaroid than he was able to process or understand. He was overwhelmed by the smoothness of the photograph, but also by the thousands of microscopic pits in the film surface that were invisible to the unassisted eye, and by the feel of the dyes and fixatives and other chemicals of which the graveyard image was composed.

Then to his touch, although not to his eye, the image on the Polaroid acquired depth, as if it were not merely a two-dimensional photograph but a window with a view of the grave, a window through which he was able to reach. He felt warm summer sun on his fingers, felt granite and bronze and a prickle of grass.

Weirder still: Now he felt a colour, as if wires had crossed in his brain, jumbling his senses, and he said, ‘Blue,’ and immediately he felt a dazzling burst of light, and as if from a distance, he heard himself say, ‘Bright.’

The feelings of blueness and light quickly became actual vis­ual experiences: The banquet room began to fade into a bright blue haze.

Gasping, Joe dropped the photograph as if it had come alive in his hand.

The blue brightness snapped to a small point in the centre of his field of vision, like the picture on a television screen when the Off switch is clicked. This point shrank until the final pixel of light hung starlike for an instant but then silently imploded and was gone.

Rose Tucker leaned across the table toward him.

Joe peered into her commanding eyes — and perceived something different from what he had seen before. The sorrow and the pity, yes. They remained. The compassion and the intelligence were still there, in as full measure as ever. But now he saw — or thought he saw — some part of her that rode a mad horse of obsession at a gallop toward a cliff over which she wanted him to follow.

As though reading his thoughts, she said, ‘Joe, what you’re afraid of has nothing to do with me. What you’re truly afraid of is opening your mind to something you’ve spent your life refusing to believe.’

‘Your voice,’ he said, ‘the whisper, the repetitive phrases — Open your heart, open your mind — like a hypnotist.’

‘You don’t really believe that,’ she said as calmly as ever. ‘Something on the Polaroid,’ he said, and heard the quiver of desperation in his voice.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘A chemical substance.’

‘No.’

An hallucinogenic drug. Absorbed through the skin.’

‘No.’

‘Something I absorbed through the skin,’ he insisted, ‘put me in an altered state of consciousness.’ He rubbed his hands on his corduroy jacket.

‘Nothing on the photograph could have entered your blood­stream through your skin so quickly. Nothing could have affected your mind in mere seconds.’

‘I don’t know that to be true.’

‘I do.’

‘I’m no pharmacologist.’

‘Then consult one,’ she said without enmity.

‘Shit.’ He was as irrationally angry with her as he had briefly been angry with Barbara Christman.

The more rattled he became, the deeper her equanimity. ‘What you experienced was synesthesia.’

‘What?’

All scientist now, Rose Tucker said, ‘Synesthesia. A sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied in a different modality.’

‘Mumbo-jumbo.’

‘Not at all. For instance, a few bars of a familiar song are played — but instead of hearing them, you might see a certain colour or smell an associated aroma. It’s a rare condition in the general population, hut it’s what most people first feel with these photos — and it’s common among mystics.’

‘Mystics!’ He almost spat on the floor. ‘I’m no mystic, Dr. Tucker. I’m a crime reporter — or was. Only the facts matter to me.’

‘Synesthesia isn’t simply the result of religious mania, if that’s what you’re thinking, Joe. It’s a scientifically documented experi­ence even among nonbelievers, and some well-grounded people think it’s a glimpse of a higher state of consciousness.’

Her eyes, such cool lakes before, seemed hot now, and when he peered into them, he looked at once away, afraid that her fire would spread to him. He was not sure if he saw evil in her or only wanted to see it, and he was thoroughly confused.

‘If it was some skin-permeating drug on the photograph,’ she said, as maddeningly soft-spoken as any devil ever had been, ‘then the effect would have lingered after you dropped it.’

He said nothing, spinning in his internal turmoil.

‘But when you released the photo, the effect ceased. Because what you’re confronted with here is nothing as comforting as mere illusion, Joe.’

‘Where’s Nina?’ he demanded.

Rose indicated the Polaroid, which now lay on the table where he had dropped it. ‘Look. See.’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be afraid.’

Anger surged in him, boiled. This was the savage anger that had frightened him before. It frightened him now, too, but he could not control it.

‘Where’s Nina, damn it?’

‘Open your heart,’ she said quietly.

‘This is bullshit.’

‘Open your mind.’

‘Open it how far? Until I’ve emptied out my head? Is that what you want me to be?’

She gave him time to get a grip on himself. Then: ‘I don’t want you to be anything, Joe. You asked me where Nina is. You want to know about your family. I gave you the photograph so you could see. So you could see.’

Her will was stronger than his, and after a while he found himself picking up the photograph.

‘Remember the feeling,’ she encouraged him. ‘Let it come to you again.’

It did not come to him again, however, although he turned the photograph over and over in his hands. He slid his fingertips in circles across the glossy image but could not feel the granite, the bronze, the grass. He summoned the blueness and the brightness, but they did not appear.

Tossing the photograph aside in disgust, he said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing with this.’

Infuriatingly patient, she smiled compassionately and held out a hand to him.

He refused to take it.

Although he was frustrated by what he now perceived as her

New Age proclivities, he also felt that somehow, by not being able to lose himself a second time in the phantasmal blue brightness, he had failed Michelle and Chrissie and Nina.

But if his experience had been only an hallucination, induced with chemicals or hypnosis, then it had no significance, and giving himself to the waking dream once again could not bring back those who were irretrievably lost.

A fusillade of confusions ricocheted through his mind.

Rose said, ‘It’s okay. The imbued photograph is usually enough. But not always.’

‘Imbued?’

‘It’s okay, Joe. It’s okay. Once in a while there’s someone . someone like you . . . and then the only thing that convinces is galvanic contact.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘The touch.’

‘What touch?’

Instead of answering him, Rose picked up the Polaroid snapshot and stared at it as though she could clearly see something that Joe could see not at all. If turmoil touched her heart and mind, she hid it well, for she seemed as tranquil as a country pond in a windless twilight.

Her serenity only inflamed Joe. ‘Where’s Nina, damn it? Where is my little girl?’

Calmly she returned the photograph to her jacket pocket.

She said, ‘Joe, suppose that I was one of a group of scientists engaged in a revolutionary series of medical experiments, and then suppose we unexpectedly discovered something that could prove to your satisfaction there was some kind of life after death.’

‘I might be a hell of a lot harder to convince than you.’

Her softness was an irritating counterpoint to his sharpness: ‘It’s not as outrageous an idea as you think. For the past couple of decades, discoveries in molecular biology and certain branches of physics have seemed ever more clearly to point toward a created universe.’

‘You’re dodging my question. Where are you keeping Nina? Why have you let me go on thinking she’s dead?’

Her face remained in an almost eerie repose. Her voice was still soft with a Zen-like sense of peace. ‘If science gave us a way to perceive the truth of an afterlife, would you really want to see this proof? Most people would say yes at once, without thinking how such knowledge would change them forever, change what they have always considered important, what they intend to do with their lives. And then. . . what if this were a revelation with an unnerving edge? Would you want to see this truth — even if it was as frightening as it was uplifting, as fearsome as it was joyous, as deeply and thoroughly strange as it was enlightening?’