Via Dolorosa(70)

“Well, then your clothes…”

“Isn’t this my own room? I would think I could dress as I choose.”

He nodded. Felt weak. “All right.”

“Stop moving the arm.”

There was no appropriate discussion for such a scenario. He did not bother. Instead, he turned away and faced his illuminated photograph that covered half the far wall. For now, for the moment, he did not want to think about anything—anything at all—and that worked out just perfectly, because he found it impossible to summon even a single coherent, linear thought. For what time remained in the dressing of his arm, he found some solace in the focusing of his name, his first name, just the four letters of its abbreviated form, wavering and ephemeral in his mind. The more he stared at his name the less it was a name and the more it became just four letters. And the more he stared at those four letters, the more they became symbols, odd symbols, hieroglyphics in the soup of his mind. He willed them to sink—and they did, individually and in their own time, deep and slow beneath the murk of his subconscious. Never did he realize how truly easy it was to drown one’s own self.

“There,” she said. “Done.”

Hoisting his arm from the pillow, he could feel the tightness of the bandage. It was keeping his arm together. The last time he had worn a bandage had been after the surgeries, and its purpose had been the same back then: to keep him together.

“Thank you,” he said.

“De nada, my Nicholas.”

“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said.

She ran a hand down his bare, sweaty back. “For what, mi novio?”

“I have to get up,” he said, pulling the sheets deeper into the fold of his lap. Isabella was sitting on some and he couldn’t pull them out from under her.

“You are like a ghost,” she said to him, “sitting here.”

“How do you mean?”

She said, “White, pale, unsure where you’ll be from one moment to the next.”

“Lost, you mean.”

“Yes,” she said. “That is good. That is what I mean exactly.” She said, “Lost.”

“You really hurt that guy tonight, I think.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Isabella, I think I need to leave.”

“This world?”

“This room.”

“You think too much, is what I think,” she told him. “Not everything is so cerebral. You should be more of an artist in your heart, Nicholas, like you are with your hands. An artist, my Nicholas, would be a good thing for you to be. Otherwise, you are a fool. Could you try not to be that much of a fool?”

“I have no intention of falling in love with you, if that’s where this is going.” Yet he did not know where such words had come from.

Smiling, she shook her head. She, it was suddenly very clear, was the one who had no intention of falling in love. Of falling in anything.

“I know that, Nicholas. You are here, now, with me, because you found you can be. Very simple, no? It seems very sad and very hard on the surface, but after it is done, it is very simple.”

And this was true, he knew. The hardest thing to do was kill one man. But after that one man, how easy was it to kill fifty?

“Do you see that picture of you?”

He faced his own glowing image on the wall. Nodded.

“It is true?”

He said he did not understand.

“It is true?” she repeated simply. “It is reality, as reality is?”

“Shit, Isabella, I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re asking. Yeah, sure it is.”

“Foolish! Nothing is real and nothing is as it seems. Are we here or are we not here? Are we ghosts or do we live? Are we lovers or have we set out to destroy each other? Nothing is as it seems. Answer me—is your arm ruined?”

“Yes.”

“And that is reality?”

“It is the only reality,” he said.

“Stupid, stupid Nicholas.”

“I need—”

“To leave, yes—I’ve heard you,” she said. “With all that thinking you do, you have yet to come up with any answers. That is unfortunate for you.”

“What are you talking about? Answers to what?”

Isabella only shrugged. Said, “Did it ever occur to you that perhaps you are angry at your wife and her secret because you are really only angry at yourself and your secret?”

“I have no secret,” he said.

“Oh, yes. I’d forgotten. Everything is candid and open with you, isn’t it? Everything,” she said, “is exactly as it seems to be.”

She stood from the bed and walked over to the slide projector, passing in front of the widening cone of light. The glowing image of himself vanished from the wall the second she pulled the slide from the projector, leaving a gaping white nothingness of light in its place. As he watched, Isabella turned the slide around and plugged it back into the slide projector backwards. The image appeared once again across the room—only this time in reverse. Now, very clearly, it was his right hand, his ruined hand that was no longer ruined, held up to the camera, shielding his face. A perfect right hand.

“See my magic?” she said from behind the slide projector. “See how nothing is as it seems?” To him, she was invisible in the dark. “Be gone. You are healed.”