Willnot by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page A

disturbance—indigestion, dizziness, swelling, pain. For years I went to bed anticipating that I might wake up a year later, or never. The thought still drops into my mind late at night sometimes. Butsuch an experience can recut the patterns of your life. Definitely it set me on the path to med school.
    What the doctors didn’t know, what no one knew, was that I hadn’t been alone. The visitors, the others, came to me as I lay there. I don’t know when they arrived, the first day, further along, but they were there for most of it. The only world and time I had was theirs.
    Before them, there was no blackness, no awareness. Nothing. Then thoughts that seemed fully my own slid into my mind, the memory of walking with an older man along train tracks in woods, and I was opening my eyes, looking around. But my eyes met only blur out there, and I shut them again. As unbearable pain from the burns swept over me.
    It could be that my mind, recoiling from the pain, fled that first visitation, but I can’t honestly accept that I possessed even so minute a degree of control.
    We sat outside a coffee shop, the woman and I, her name was Judith, and I knew, knew without precedent or indication, that she was about to dump me. Many years had passed since them. But as the waiter approached, a great tide of loss swelled within me, as I ordered, as I waited. Her hand reached across the table for mine.
    Above me, somewhere near the room’s ridged green wall coverings and the silent TV’s scrambling cars, words were being mouthed. They were telling me again what happened, how they came home and found me facedown on the floor, that I would be okay. Spanish. And while I don’t speak Spanish, I understood every word.
    No, not I: the man on the bed.
    Again, my eyes opened. I looked up at the light-blue ceiling. Blue, was that the right word? And through the window at a darkening sky. No sense of where I was. Sounds past the door. People talking, phones ringing, heavy objects being moved about. Liftedmy hand into light from the hallway. Tube, needle, tape. Thick, ropy blue veins. Faded white line on the third finger where some time ago a ring had been. Hospital armband with a name I, we, don’t recognize.
    Hundreds of them moved through me as I lay there. First those nearby, other patients, nurses, visitors, staff. Then, gradually, people beyond the hospital walls, out on the street, at the bus stop, across town.
    When I woke at the end of that dormant year and my sister, realizing that I was back among the living, stood, I saw myself there on the bed as she drew toward me, I walked with her (right leg stiff and painful from a bike accident) across the floor, I felt the tug of carpet at her shoes, felt the explosion of joy within—felt everything she felt.
    And so it would be for some time after. I’d be pouring milk into my coffee mug and with no warning find myself sitting on a riverbank. As I walked by an office high-rise the all-but-unbearable emotional pain of someone within would crash down into me. I lived with double vision: here and not here, I and not-I, I and other. I lived, walked, slept and dreamed in multiple worlds.
    Over time it faded, so slowly at first that I took little notice. I was busy, with school, with chores, books, friends. Fishing with my sister. (We called what we did fishing, but mostly this amounted to sitting side by side with poles and tackle box talking.) Till one day—I was in college by then, eighteen or so—I found myself reaching for what was no longer there, understood that I had been doing so, thoughtlessly, for months.
    Sometimes even then, in flashes, in stabs, the visitors would come to me, a face, a keen of sadness, shadows. Blades of light sweeping through darkness and quickly gone.
    Before the doors shut (I thought) for good.

9
    “The bodies weren’t alone in there,” Seb Daiche said, eyes veering to the coffeemaker against the back wall as it began loudly burping. He’d arrived from the