Meeks by Julia Holmes Read Free Book Online Page A

oxygen, he was calmed by the crowds now parting on either side of him. Married men in bright ties and light sweaters, policemen in uniform, laborers in their grays smocks . . . bachelors, bachelors, bachelors. He stopped. Where were the other men in black suits? Did no one else in this city have to mourn? He stepped off the path and settled again, a few feet back, in the grass. I am grieving too hard and too deeply, he thought.
    Meeks
    I woke up beside the statue of the Captain, the gun requisition forms folded neatly in my pocket, a bag of apples by my head. I had been dreaming about the man in the black jacket. I had last seen him at the hospital, on a night long, long ago, or so it seems, though the human mind is surely the weakest instrument available in the study of the passage of time. We were at the hospital. The lights were out throughout the city for a Vigilance Drill. The attending Brothers of Mercy carried their blue-hued medical lights through the ward. I had climbed into bed with my mother, and I cradled her head against my chest. Her arm was draped over my knees, her hand dangled over the edge of my leg. I could feel the damp heat of her skin and thought: I won't feel this much longer, and then . . . I will never feel it again. The air was still, my grief imprisoned somewhere in my brain. I waited rationally, coolly, for Mother to tell me where to find my inheritance. I pictured a locked metal box, ice-cold in the soft, blind earth of the park.
    The man in the black jacket watched us. A devoted son soothes his ailing mother, while a person of some eminence or intimacy looks on—this scene repeated itself up and down the ward. The apparent normalcy of our quaint tableau enforced by the presence of the Brothers, the presence, fading, of my mother. I believed her death should mean everything to those who were witnessing it. Brothers glided past us like sharks in the blue light, as if drawing strength from the air without breathing it, turning their ancient resignation in my direction: As for your suffering, it's all been done before. The man in the black jacket leaned back in his chair, his face falling out of the circle of blue light in which Mother and I resided. He was silent, every now and then making marks in a notebook that he held open on his lap.
    We stayed like that for hours; the Brothers sometimes paused at the foot of the bed with their blue lamps swinging from rusted metal handles. The man in the black jacket sketching, filling up the pages of his notebook. Mother and I, her dying, me grieving, waiting to grieve. The Brothers walked on, down the row of beds, soaking the crisp, white sheets in the blue light of the medical lanterns. I wondered when and how Mother would communicate the location of my inheritance with all of these people listening and watching. I knew she had provided for me, but I didn't know how to proceed toward these provisions without her there as my guide.
    Mother, I whispered, where can I find what I need?
    She pointed feebly toward the ceiling and tried to speak. I leaned in very close. Him, she finally managed. In Him.
    Captain Meeks? I whispered, and Mother was silenced by a wave of pain. I watched the agony pass over her face and waited patiently for her to return. Him, she insisted after a few minutes and pointed to the ceiling again.
    Not him , Mother, I said, meaning the man in the black jacket, but she had disappeared into another red wave of pain. I glanced at the man in the black jacket, hunched over his notepad in the low light, and felt confident that he was not the him in question. I wished that he would go, so that Mother and I could speak more openly. I stared thoughtfully at the ceiling, gazed into the blue light passing in waves across the rafters and imagined I was deep underwater: the wooden rafters were the keels of powerful ships bobbing on the surface, the lifeless bulbs were the silhouettes of eels and fish. I considered that I alone knew something about what