Burial of the Dead

SERENITY - IX.

IX.

And this is Levon’s room: A rectilinear space, Van Gogh in Arles, a bed, a red blanket, a desk, a floor that recedes to infinity, his difficulties with perspective. No fire, no fireplace, a window, a lamp, two candles, a mug and a chair. The chair’s broken. One night he leaned back like Bruce Lee, his chi focused at T5, all weight, all force, all newtons and the chair cracked, splintered, broke. Now Bruce Lee sits on a makeshift stool.

She invited him for midnight. Saturday night. Late summer. In a lodge by a lake. When Doctor Ley would be away.

He leaves his room and stands on his porch.

The patients are asleep, each in their own miniature cottage along the hills and down the slope.

From inside, through a screen door, his alarm, the small black one with the little chick-cheep, rings at 11:45. He set it this morning thinking otherwise he might fall asleep and miss the whole thing.

Outside the cabins are visible in the dark.

He walks down the hill, across the parking lot, past the kitchen and stops before the back door of the main lodge.

Overhead more music. A pale sound. Singer songwriter stuff. Mild, almost soft. He wonders if Molly’s watching. She’s always watching, she thinks she’s a cop. When they found her she was passed out with a jug lying under her bed with a police scanner clutched to her chest. He gave her an angel and touched her arm.

He takes out the key and tries to place it in the lock. It doesn’t fit. He tries again. The misfit key sticks and makes noise, an unlikely scratch. He thinks he’s been betrayed. Tested and failed. He waits for searchlights and whistles and horns and German Shepherds, barking, frothing, teeth bared, straining, the bulging fur of brown necks against leather, jaws, torque, teeth and the black coats, the arrogance of power.

The cascading anger comes to rest with the white pebbles of an avalanche resting over some quiet Swiss village.

He looks about, and then walks the perimeter of the huge house. The windows are tall and wide with heavy drapes pulled tight. The glow of nightlights soak the fabric. He hears the sound of the smallest outboard on the water a mile away. He looks up to the second floor and beyond that to the gables set on either side of a third window, a black square.

He makes the final turn and crosses the wide deck where Dr. Ley fires up the grill on Sunday afternoons and feeds the patients picnic food. He’s kindly on Sundays. Children, Church and Kitchen. Kinder, kirche, kuche. KKK. Twelve steps to Munich and the Eagle’s nest. But Levon knows the whole story about Dr. Ley and his wife; about how he treated her years ago and how he loves her small Swiss body, the contours and curves of an entirely self-sufficient being; about how he loves her mean spirit, the many methods of rejection, the betrayals, the affairs, the way she flirts with the young men, in his presence, on Sundays on the deck, at picnics with the funnels of steam and smoke and the sizzle and the smell of meat and the bowls of chips and the trash cans filled with ice.

“She’s got a mature woman’s hands,” Levon thinks, “the length of her fingers, the shape of her thumb, the impervious declamation of those long nails. And with those hands she knows how to hurt the Doctor, by touching somebody else, flashing her eyes as if to say: ‘See, Herr Doctor? Can you see what I’m doing? Can you see what I’ve done?’”

Far away a dog barks.

The wind falls through the trees.

Levon stands in front of the front door. He places the key in the lock and the pressure’s enough to open the open door. Marta steps down the last three steps of the staircase, crosses the floor and sits in a chair in the center of the room. She wears a hand-knit sweater, the kind made with needles made for giant fingers. It falls below her knees. She’s crying and she holds tissues in her hand.

“What is it?” he asks.

And she doesn’t answer, but only cries.

“What is it?” he asks again, and she looks at him as if he were an addendum, a footnote, an inconsequential member of the cast, a bit player whose presence must be acknowledged, but doesn’t matter. Something far more important than a midnight rendezvous has taken place – is taking place, even as he stands there, something of moment, something serious.

“Marta, please,” he says, “tell me what’s happened,” and he kneels before her, taking her hands in his, watching her eyes as she looks away, as if he could be anybody, as if the real story resides elsewhere, in some parallel reality, and all of this is unnecessary, though deserving of something like the politeness of manners, the rituals of arm’s-length transactions.

“Is someone upstairs?” he asks. “Is there something wrong upstairs?” And the two of them look towards the stairs, and she can only mumble words through the contractions and contortions of muscles, gasping for breath, weeping real tears as the world spins away and loss is more than a falling, but a closure, a burial.

He stands; her hands drop to her side. He crosses the room where the cherry banister ends with a pedestal with the head of a lion. He takes three steps, and only then, with the name he stole from another, a name that now sounds false, that no longer seems necessary or appropriate, does he turn to her, below him now, looking down, her hands over her face, crying without tears.

“What happened, Marta?”

She says nothing.

“Please, tell me what happened here?”

She’s silent.

“Who, Marta?”

He climbs the stairs. One step to the second floor.

“Manny,” he slips, confusing ghosts and the flight of shadows, stepping to the second floor which is dark except for a vertical line of light from behind a door, nearly closed at the far end of the hallway.

“Manny,” he says again, and the game he’s been playing to protect himself in a shroud of make-believe and memories seen through the gauzy veils of personal mythology fall away like scales, translucent and dry, and Matthew – not Levon, but Matthew, now – remembers the body of a woman lying on a bed in her bedroom in a house in West Hartford. An unusual passing, he thought then, and thinks now, with Manny’s cruelties, with Sullivan’s scramble to free himself, to benefit, to receive what he believes to be his, with his brother’s many betrayals and his mother’s blind refusal to love, all of it as crooked and contradictory as the primordial lie, as old as death, itself, resting like the timeless serpent coiled at the center of all betrayal, all murder, all greed, all pride, all power, all sin ….

He looks down on her for the last time (for her time is over-drawn) as this sylvan charade, this illusion of woods, water and passions now lingers on the cusp of dissolution, and she looks up at him and watches him, her mouth moving, speaking silent words. He can’t read lips, but he thinks she’s telling him that she loves him, that she had nothing to do with crimes of the heart, that whatever waits behind the door at the end of the hallway is just another one of those things we struggle with - each of us, in the silence of our rooms, as we try to make our way, to perform the task set before us, to achieve a desired result, the mathematics of success, to live out the unconscious impulses drafted like directives in the mysterious alphabet of genes and chemistry, inherited, neither sought nor desired, but there, controlling and ultimately doomed, conscious of shame, guilt, an ending or perhaps the end.