Willnot by James Sallis Read Free Book Online

recalcitrance,” I told Joel Stern. “I can’t say much because there’s not much.”
    I offered the abstract: Bobby’s sudden appearance, his sphinxlike remarks, his departure. How he’d stopped out on the street to speak with Old Ezra and given him money.
    “Did he know this man?”
    “Couldn’t have.”
    “Interesting.” Stern glanced again at his computer. Photos were streaming. A desert landscape, an Asian- or African-looking city saturated with off-plumb buildings.
    “Have you spoken with an FBI agent by the name of Ogden?”
    He nodded. “As you’d expect, on the record she was not forthcoming. Off the record she wanted me to understand, all of this expressed quite politely, that if I got in her way, if I did anything to impede her investigation, she’d kick my ass into next Tuesday.”
    “A free press is so important.”
    “Everybody knows. So, nothing else you can tell me?”
    “Call-me-Bobby that walked into my office is a stranger. And ethics preclude discussing my patient Brandon Lowndes.”
    “Understood.”
    We shook hands. He climbed back in his car, shut the top of his computer, then, driver’s door still open, swung back around to look up at me.
    “Do you know what your old patient did in the service, Doctor Hale?”
    “Marines, is all.”
    “He was a shooter. A scout sniper.”
    With that, Joel Stern shut the door, fired up an engine that needed work, and pulled away, swimming back into the mainstream, heading for the next edge.

8
    “I was eight, maybe nine.” Our favorite time of day, light slowly fading but not yet forgone, time itself slowing, the moment like a held breath. Wittgenstein: If eternity is timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. “I got home from school and found it on the windowsill outside the kitchen. Hunched back against the glass unmoving, its bright orange kernel of an eye alive with what I recognized as terror. It had been hurt somehow. Damaged. It couldn’t fly.”
    We were sitting outside, a project and mission, or perhaps an altruistic dinner offering, for hordes of mosquitoes who appeared to be quite fond of the smoking candles guaranteed to repel them.
    “I kept going out there all afternoon and night, checking up on it. Took food and water out, some dry cat food that it ate. When I went out after dinner, this had to be the fifth or sixth time, it was gone.”
    “What kind?”
    “Magpie, my old man said.”
    “Cats got it?”
    “Cats, dogs, a hawk. Probably so. But in my mind—in my mind, it flew away.”
    You live with someone year after year, you think you’ve heard all the stories, but you never have.
    Richard slapped at a mosquito on his arm. “Three thousand five hundred species of these wee wonders, and only the females suck blood.”
    Accustomed as I am to such sidelong pronouncements, I simply smiled.
    So that’s how it came about, my partner’s troth for rescuing animals.
    When I was twelve, wholly without prior sign or indication I fell into a coma. My parents came into my room late one morning and found me: not visibly ill, no fever, no rash, breathing slowly and easily, unresponsive. Most of that year I spent in the hospital, my sister at my bedside every possible chance and often allowed by parents and staff to stay overnight, sleeping in a chair by my bed. Katherine was what I first saw when months later, again without prelude, I opened my eyes. She rushed to me and took the hand I vainly attempted to lift. Signals were going out, move, move, but wouldn’t catch. Like a battery almost gone, a sparkler that won’t stay lit. “What did I miss?” I finally said.
    Despite serial EEGs, scans, spinal taps, consultations and conjecture, the doctors never diagnosed the origins of the coma. What we can tell you is just to live, they said. Embrace your life. Don’t look back.
    Once you’ve experienced that kind of siege illness, you’re forever expecting its return at the first signs of