The Tyrant's Novel (22 page)

In all this there was a passage which meant something to me:

In the Palace of Disappearance, a prisoner must distance himself from the clammy walls, the cockroaches, the lice in the bedding pallet, and the stench of one's own waste from the bucket. Here there is no light but the light a man creates for himself. To discuss anything with common criminals, amongst whom politicals are often placed, is an indignity, weakens the soul, and reduces its status. The Great Uncle of the Nation, being so profoundly influenced by the experience of imprisonment on two occasions, one short, one much longer, appreciates the horror of the Palace of Disappearance and thus, when he came to his present eminence, decided that this sanction should be used only sparingly, and solely against those individuals who had seriously violated the trust of the people.

I wondered did he thus sometimes undertake summary justice, as it happened with Mrs. Douglas's nephew, to save the prisoner from the memory of seepage, stench, and itch.

Reading those notes, for reasons I cannot gauge, finished me. Maybe it was that their spirit approximated to the spirit of my awful melodrama. I surrendered. I could not go further. I had come to an end. Trembling, I called Andrew and asked him could he enlist Dr. Prentice.

I'll speak to him, said Andrew, and later rang me back.

Okay, the situation is that he's researching the DNA of sudden adult death syndrome sufferers. The deaths, as I told you, of apparently fit young people. Two days' time, Alan. I'll take you to the cemetery nine o'clock Thursday.

The flow of the melodrama immediately shut off. I resorted again to McBrien's liquor.

The day it was done, there was an evil wind out of the desert and the light turned the river the color of ink. Andrew remarked that he had never known an early August day to be as bad as this; the cold was of a clammy febrile quality, and smears of black grit blew across the face of a dim sun. We parked, as is the national custom, and as we had done at the burial, outside the cemetery gates—the pathologist must have taken a truck in, but it was so normal for the living to approach the dead on foot that we could not break the tradition, especially since we were both, to varying degrees, consumed by guilt.

I did not let myself think at all. I was numb as we found our way amongst the monuments towards a small marquee where men in white coats waited, their gloved hands folded in front of them. In contrast to their professionally hygienic demeanor, I noticed the rough clothing and lustily unsterile air of the two grave diggers who had prised the marble slabs aside and already dug out the grave. They had erected a creaky-looking windlass of thin iron uprights near the head of the grave. I was in near and indefinable panic as Andrew nudged me forward.

There's Dr. Prentice, said Andrew, almost cheerily, as he edged me on amongst the monumental columns of mourning and across the arid gravel between graves.

I stood at the graveside, and like a man with vertigo risking a cliff edge, forced my eyes down. There was the sullied, earth-stained white coffin, immaculate on the day of burial, as sturdy still as a reproach in the disturbed earth.

One of the grave diggers gave a dry cough to advise me not to fall in. I staggered and Andrew caught me.

How will they get it out? I asked.

With ropes, he said, nodding to the dusty grave attendants. They're used to it.

I saw a tall, soapy-featured man in a white coat approach me. His eyes were full of a doglike melancholy. Come with me aside for a moment, Mr. Sheriff, he said.

He took me away towards a bare patch amidst the graves. He asked for permission to smoke and took off one glove and hitched up his white coat and extracted cigarettes from a crushed pack taken from his pants pocket. Lighting one, he pushed the pack back again.

I see you're distressed, he asserted. It is, of course, natural enough. But I believe you need something extracted from your wife's grave.

A manuscript and some disks, I told him and began sobbing.

I'll sterilize the pages for you. We have an autoclave for that purpose still working at the lab. The disks I'll need to disinfect by hand. I'll have all of it delivered to you later today.

Let me see her, though, I demanded.

He clamped his cigarette in his lips and held up a hand, counseling me against that. He said, It seems from her certificate the cause of her death was a cerebral aneurysm. But maybe that subarachnoid hemorrhage wasn't severe enough on its own. Maybe she was susceptible to this sudden adult death syndrome in which apparently healthy young people drop dead leaving very little trace of the cause—their hearts look perfectly healthy to a medical examiner, but even so their hearts, not their brains, are the cause.

I felt very much at sea to hear him ring the changes on causes of death, and he could perceive that.

Look, he said, it probably was the severe aneurysm, but SADS, the syndrome I'm working on, is also marked by occasional predeath migraine episodes or dizziness. Do you understand? That's why I'm doing this.

Of course, I said.

Nothing gross will occur, he assured me. We will open the coffin, unwrap the funeral bindings. And I must take a scrape of flesh from the arm or thigh to justify the exhumation. We have no sophisticated testing here. I have to send my samples to England for testing in a lab in Exeter already dedicated to researching the syndrome. We'll have the results in about six weeks.

I must see her, I persisted.

You can't be dissuaded. He sighed. It isn't her.

I owe it.

But it really isn't her. The cells that were her have ruptured. Autolysis has taken place. Self-digestion of the body. It is now a matter of bacteria and fungi and protozoa. It's hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, sulphur dioxide. It is fatty acids. It is nothing to do with you or any humane obligations.

I grabbed his free, gloved hand like a pleading infant.

He said, You're very affected, young man. Then if you must. But briefly, I counsel.

He finished his cigarette. He nodded towards the grave, into which one of the workers had descended carrying a rope.

What's he doing? I asked like a panicked child.

He's putting a rope around one end of the coffin, then he'll do the other end and . . . I'll go back to the tent, if you'll excuse me.

I walked back to the grave and stood beside Andrew. The busy grave diggers connected all the ropes they had placed beneath Sarah's coffin to a single cable attached to their rickety windlass, itself powered by a small petrol motor. One of them, tugging at a lever, started it into chugging life, and they both steadied the coffin as it rose, jettisoning clods of earth. When it was clear, one of them altered a primitive gear on the machine, and swung the windlass on its base and delicately lowered the coffin to solid ground. The engine was cut, and in the silence, somewhere over the river, beyond neem trees, a lonely bird called some loveless
too-wheet
to the vacant day. The men functionally detached the rope and carried the coffin to the tent, where Dr. Prentice held the flap open for them. The weight of the coffin and Sarah did not seem to strain them.

Andrew saw my tear-smudged face.

Don't say anything, I ordered him.

But all at once his shoulders were shuddering. He, Andrew, the steady man, raised a tear-drenched face to me. I loved her, he said. I don't know how. As a father, an uncle. Maybe in my mind as a lover, but I was always confused about that. You behave like you have a monopoly, Alan. But
I
loved her.

I was appalled by this display. It was like watching a father confess his sins and his hopelessness. But then I embraced him and felt his body quaking within my arms.

We waited together ten minutes, through unutterable phases of tears, numbness, and panic. But Andrew's collapse had tipped some courage my way—the sense that I was not isolated in my bell jar of torment. I bravely made conversation. I talked to him about this sudden adult death syndrome theory of Dr. Prentice. Andrew could sense it was something I found hard to adapt to. The tragedy which had had only one awful name now potentially had two. Uncertainty had entered.

Don't worry, whispered Andrew, cleaning up his face with a handkerchief. Prentice's critics say he thinks anyone under forty who drops dead has died of that syndrome. In fact, some doctors doubt whether it can properly be called a syndrome.

The grave diggers came out of the marquee early, nodded, and went off to smoke by their windlass. Andrew put his arm around me.

Dr. Prentice emerged from the tent, gloveless now. He whacked his pants pockets again, yearning for a smoke, but thinking better.

Do you want to come now, Mr. Sheriff?

I'll come too, said Andrew.

The doctor held back the marquee flap and we entered the enclosed air. I was well used to the smell of death from all those zealots who trod on mines on Summer Island, and something in my brain had already prepared me to accept that, though the smell of corruption seemed discreet, focused, almost delicate in here, sharing little with the vaster, generic stench of the battlefield. I saw my manuscript and disks, wrapped in plastic, on a side table. The portable steel table on which she had lain for Prentice's test was being sprayed and swabbed by a lab assistant. And so I gathered myself, my nostrils pinched, and regarded the open coffin.

There are no words for what one sees of the beloved months after death. She was tucked back into her winding sheet, so that we could see only the face, the temples, the ruin of her hair. I looked of course on the putrefaction of all love. It was not her, as Dr. Prentice had said, and yet it was. It was on one hand the parody of a bride. The features were sunken and patchily protected by areas of leather or parchment. The veins at the temples and forehead were a black tracery, as if a malign, skeletal plant had overgrown her brow. But she was above all something pitiful and violated, which should never have been exposed again to air for the convenience of the living.

I heard Dr. Prentice muttering to Andrew Kennedy, These high-priced coffins! Don't do as much for the corpse as the undertakers say.

What was worse was that having seen this beloved victim, I did not want to join her yet in this state, in the journey her flesh was making. I had had that option once, but now not only had it somehow been taken from me, but I would not have chosen it. I had become a normal coward again. I stood there in such a quandary and state of shame that my legs gave way, and Andrew and the doctor helped me out into the air.

You'll get the items this afternoon, Dr. Prentice whispered to me.

Andrew took me to a café where he was known, for he wanted them to put cognac in my coffee.

I never said an improper word to her, he told me, staring into his own coffee.

I know, I said. I knew the nation loved her.

Even Great Uncle, said Andrew with stricken eyes. He knew the score. But he wouldn't punish her.

Soon McBrien turned up, father-to-be, splendid looking in his suit. Andrew and I gathered ourselves together to face him. It occurred to me he had often been edgy when a writer, but he was smooth now. In my shock, he looked to me like a visitor from a remote place—the morning's experiences had driven him out of mind. Not even when grave robbing had I remembered his unborn child. Now he would need to be informed about the morning's dark work.

To my vast relief, Andrew said, I've filled Matt in. On this morning. You don't have to explain anything to him.

McBrien touched my arm. A good idea, he said, nodding a lot. Now you have a choice of texts, don't you?

Yes.

Steinbeck or Achebe. Hemingway or Ben Okri.

I believe that at Kennedy's instructions the waiter was being more generous with me in pouring our laced coffee than he was with the others. I receded from my friends, swept away from them, a little bit like a passenger on a train, listening to the diminishing and less and less comprehensible best wishes of those on the platform. I was already dense-headed and neutralized by liquor when Louise James entered in her good American weeds. Some of the older men in the place, I could tell even tipsy, disapproved of her on principle, but their disapproval had an erotic edge to it as well. It was the willingness of women of her class to drink coffee on equal terms with men in such places as this which gave coffeehouses a bad name with plain folk and rural Intercessionists.

Alan, she said. I hope you're feeling well.

Kennedy's got me half drunk, I said, but with a smile.

Why not? asked Andrew. The boy has had an awful morning. Let's get something to eat. Some kabobs or something.

I barely participated in the conversation after Louise James sat down. It was a little like listening to clever people on the far side of a wall. Sometimes, out of reflex comradeship, I smiled when they laughed.

The food came, and tea. At some stage Andrew Kennedy asked us to excuse him—he obviously intended to visit the lavatory.

I'll join you, said McBrien, his tie undone.

Suddenly Louise James's large eyes were upon me and she spoke like a doctor diagnosing a case. I have the cure, she promised. I've thought about it at some length. For years in fact. Why don't we go ahead with marriage, Alan?

Why would you want to? I asked, frowning in distaste.

We would be a good alliance. I am now a New World woman. I am permitted to make the first move.

She beamed at that idea. We choose our husbands, and I have chosen you. I will save you from grief.

Grief? I asked, uncomprehending.

Yes. Of course, only in so far as I can. But I'll make you a happy home. Did you think you were never going to marry again?

Yes.

Well, she said. Perhaps you could expand your thoughts.

Do you know what happened this morning?

She frowned now. No.

I've just robbed my wife's grave.

Robbed?

I shook my head, knowing that of course I could not tell more. Let it go, I urged her. The thing is, you don't know anything about me.

I read your stories. They are classics. De Maupassant, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Munro, Grace Paley. You're everything they are.