Silent Echo

I laugh. Why I find my failing health funny, I don’t know. But I know Eddie’s sense of humor and it gets to me. With the exception of Numi, Eddie probably knows me best. At least he did back when I was healthy. Back when I didn’t know who my true friends were. Now I do, and Eddie isn’t one of them. Not anymore.

“I look like shit, but thanks for sparing my feelings.”

Eddie smiles weakly, not really hearing me. He’s lost in his own grief. His lower jaw suddenly quivers. “I don’t know how to go on, Jimmy.”

I nod. I don’t know what to say to him.

“I don’t know how to recover from this. I feel broken. I feel helpless. I don’t know what to do.”

“Finding this asshole is a start,” I say.

He nods, waits, and then nods again. “Yes, I suppose so. Then what?”

“We’ll take it one step at a time.”

“One step,” he says. He then looks around me at the pictures of his slaughtered wife. “Where do you think she went, Jimmy?”

“What do you mean?”

“That part of her that’s Olivia. Not this… this physical husk.”

I’d never heard of a human body referred to as a physical husk, but I play along. “Somewhere better than here, let’s hope.”

“Is that what you hope for when your time comes, Jimmy?”

The question is more personal than I am prepared for. But I am game. I have thought long and hard about where I might go, if anywhere. “Yes,” I answer. “That’s what I hope.”

“Somewhere better than here?”

“Yes.”

“Is here so bad?”

I think about his question as I feel my body losing strength. I finally sit next to him, stepping away from the easels. “It’s not so bad, Eddie. But it could be better.”

He nods, and when he speaks, his voice is barely above a whisper. “Better, yes.”

“Where do you think she’s gone, Eddie?”

He snaps his head up and says almost immediately, “Infinity.”

“Infinity?”

I’ve never heard of the Great Beyond referred to as Infinity, but who is to say he is wrong? Infinity is as good an answer as any.

I say, “Either way, she is at peace now. No one can hurt her anymore.”

Eddie nods at this. I can see he’s trying to stay calm, to keep it together, to hold back the tears. He doesn’t need to hold back the tears. I get the tears. I’ve seen the tears. Hell, I’ve cried them enough for myself.

Finally, he says, “I never got to say ‘sorry’ to her. I think that’s what hurts more than anything.”

I knew they fought often. She had left him because of such a fight. Eddie is like most men. Neither good nor bad, just a guy doing his best with the psychological makeup he’d developed over the years. His personality was a bit of a hothead. A bit of a dick. But a big heart. Yes, I knew he had been infatuated with Jewel, perhaps in love with her, too. But the sorrow on his face convinces me he loved his wife as well. Two women he cared about. Both dead.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“And please don’t say she can hear me, that she’s near. She’s not near,” he says bitingly.

According to Eddie, she’s in Infinity, wherever the fuck that is. I say nothing and wait. I haven’t planned on telling him she was near, but if my dreams and visions have anything to do with it, she is damn near. Closer than he might think.

That thought comforts me.

Infinity… not so much. I do not want to think that when I die, my soul will be scattered into Infinity, to be swept away in the great ethereal tide, to never return.

“Are you close, Jimmy?”

I know what Eddie is referring to. I hear it all the time.

“Hard to say.”

“Please help me find the bastard.”

“I’m doing my best.”

“Your best is better than most.”

“Not anymore,” I say. “Not these days.”

Eddie suddenly frowns. He’s been studying the pictures behind me. “Do you mind if I have a look?”

“Are you sure, Eddie?”

“I’ll be okay.”

Eddie looks at my display of easels, scanning them as I have already done a hundred times. “What connection do you see?” he inquires, without taking his eyes off my masterpieces.

For some reason, and without hesitation, I return the question. “That,” I say, “remains to be seen.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I am sitting alone on my balcony.

What would have been a spectacular view of the Los Feliz area was rendered into a mediocre view, thanks to my neighbor and his damned eucalyptus trees. Had they been properly trimmed, my view would have been endless. A sea of lights that stretched from the Hollywood Hills to downtown Los Angeles, and everywhere in between.

Lots of humanity between those two landmarks. Lots of crime, too. And one killer. A child killer, no less.

But I’m not thinking about the damn trees, although every time I do I feel mild irritation. No, at the moment, I’m relaxing in a cushioned chaise longue and feeling the wind on my face… trying to get the most out of a body that would soon be dead.

I did not know that I would spend my last days on this earth chasing my brother’s killer. I’d thought I would be wasting them away at The Coffee Bean or, worse, dying alone in my bedroom. Then again, with Numi around, I am never alone now, am I?

So, with the cool wind in my hair and the eucalyptus trees swaying in front of me, doing their damnedest to block out the Los Angeles night skyline, I again go through the last day I saw my brother. The last minutes, in fact. I do this often. And why wouldn’t I? It was the last time I saw him alive. The last time he would have been happy. Before I failed him. Before life failed him. Before God failed him.

I’m also thinking about last night. I don’t want to, but I do. Numi had broken the “bathroom rule” when he’d insisted that I take a bath with baking soda and Epsom salts—a combination he’d insisted would draw toxins out of my degenerating shell of a body and allow my skin to absorb the important minerals. I did not argue with Numi. I knew better. Anyway, he’d done his best to give me privacy—even holding up a towel so that I could undress with what dignity I had left.

Turns out it wasn’t much. I nearly fell over and Numi caught my naked body before I hit the towel rack next to me. The impact surely would have done some serious damage. I didn’t thank him. I yelled at him for distracting me and ordered him out of the bathroom. He said nothing, merely nodding, and waited just on the other side of the door in case I should need him.