All's Well(90)

I look up from my phone. Paul. Standing there in the doorway of the theater. Dressed strangely. Hair longer. Looking slightly afraid of me.

“What are you doing here, Goldfish? Have you come to see the show? You’re early. We don’t open until tomorrow.”

“Miranda, are you all right?”

Hugo. Just Hugo standing there with a coffee in hand. Black Sabbath T-shirt under a weathered plaid shirt. Over that, a worn biker jacket studded with pins.

“Fine,” I say. “Long night. Eyes playing tricks on me.”

“You should go home. Get some rest before tomorrow night. Tonight, I guess, now,” he says, looking at his phone.

“I need to be here. Grace isn’t here, sadly, so I need to be.”

“You need sleep, Miranda.”

“I don’t need sleep; Grace needs sleep. I don’t need anything at all. All’s well and we’re doing wonderfully.”

“You’re bleeding again,” he says.

“Am I?”

He comes over to me and kneels down. Looks at my leg, which is indeed bleeding again. He traces the wound with his finger, tenderly. So tenderly I can’t help but close my eyes. So much tenderness now. Over what? A little cut. A cut that doesn’t even hurt at all. I could drown in this tenderness, suffocate under all these soft words, these soft touches and looks. Where was it all before? Where was all this tenderness when I needed it most, when I was lying on the floor dreaming of a touch like this, of a voice that would say something, anything, kind? Nowhere. Then his face was a shut door. His heart was closed like a fist. His hands stayed at his sides and his eyes observed my weeping like unfortunate weather. Something to be borne until it passed.

“Does that hurt?” he asks me now, touching my leg like I’m such a delicate, wounded thing.

“No,” I say. “Not even a little bit.”

I run my fingers over the fine blond hairs at the back of his neck. Golden in the light. “Just a little blood, Paul. Just a little blood, for fuck’s sake, that’s all.” I smile.

Underneath my hand, his neck stiffens. Suddenly all the tenderness in his face goes out like a light. He brushes my hand away, gets up, and walks away from me.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“Work,” he mutters over his shoulder.

“Wait! What’s wrong? Tell me.”

He stops. Turns to me again, shaking his head. “I just don’t understand it.”

“Don’t understand what?”

“I don’t understand why you’re not feeling it.”

“Not feeling what?”

He looks at me. You know what. This. You and I. But he says, “That cut.”

He looks down at my leg and frowns. Pouts, really. I can’t help but laugh, but Hugo doesn’t laugh with me. He just looks at me dead serious. Offended.

“God, what is it with you and this cut?” I say. “Do you want me to feel it? Is that it?”

“No, I don’t want you to feel it, I just don’t understand how you can’t.”

“It’s just a little fucking cut.”

“It’s an open wound, Miranda.”

I shrug. “People have different degrees of pain tolerance. It’s all relative.” I smile to show him how it’s relative. But he’s still frowning at my leg, at the cut that goes on grinning.

“Are you on drugs, is that it?” he says. So serious.

“What? No. No, no, no.” I shake my head.

“Do you have that condition where people don’t feel pain? I saw this whole thing about it on 60 Minutes.”

“Did you?”

He nods. He looks at me so earnestly, so hopeful even. Wanting me to tell him, yes, that’s it. Absolutely. That’s me. I’m this thing he saw on 60 Minutes. That’s all this is, this happiness, this health, this immunity. Waiting for me to explain my smile as an affliction.

“You really want me to feel pain, don’t you? You want me to hurt. That’s a bit sick, don’t you think?”

“I don’t want you to hurt. But if something is supposed to hurt, then yes, I want you to hurt. You’re human.”

He reaches out and touches my cheek. So fucking tenderly. A tenderness that says, Go on. Break for me. I’ll pick up every piece of you, promise.

“You wanted those people you assaulted to hurt, didn’t you?” I say to him. “You wanted them to be in pain.”

Silence now. He drops his hand from my cheek. His expression shifts, darkens. A shimmer of violence, of who he used to be, flashes across his face like lightning. For a second, he looks like someone who would have held a knife. Pointed its blade at a pulsating throat. I can see those hands on a neck, wringing. Those eyes watching the breath leave a face, watching it turn blue above his grip. No remorse in those eyes. Those eyes looking at me now. Then he looks away.

“Yes, I did,” he says quietly, shaking his head like he could shake it all away. “But I was a different person then. And that was a different time in my life. And I can tell you I suffered a hell of a lot more than they did. In the end.”

I watch him stare remorsefully at the floor. I have a flash of Hugo in jail. His redemption through Shakespeare and a cheap little Mary statue he stole from the library. Hugo kneeling before it in his orange jumpsuit, a broken, repentant man whispering his paltry sins into her little bump of an ear. Feeling so atoned by this. Forgiven. Reading Shakespeare plays in his cell under her lidless gaze. Discovering a world of complicated monsters. Building his first sets, making that world come alive without a hammer. Learning life skills through The Tempest, Macbeth, Richard III. Performing stories of men who cross line after line after line. Thinking, Not me anymore. Thinking, Never again. The Mary statue sits on his bedroom dresser now beside a dog-eared Collected Works of Shakespeare. She watches him with her painted smile while he sleeps. He dreams so peacefully. I’ve seen him sleep like this, with my eyes wide open. Always wide open now. I think of Grace’s open eyes. Staring at me as I glowed with stolen health before her.