Unbury Carol(50)

But his eyes remained. His eyes were the last to go and with them Smoke saw Moxie through the blaze.

The outlaw wasn’t laughing. Wasn’t talking, wasn’t anything.

Wasn’t burning, neither.





It’s your own breathing, Hattie said. She said it once and she said it with such flat finality that a very young Carol never forgot it. Hattie had a way of talking like that when she wanted to. Her maternal face would become something of a static rendering, a face that neither frowned nor smiled. The truth, Carol came to understand it, as Hattie saw it.

For years the theory helped Carol. At eight years old, hearing hoarse breathing inside the coma was enough to scare her silly. Was someone else in there with her? Did something live in Howltown?

It’s your own breathing.

No further explanation. No saying that Carol’s body was slowed down and if her heart beat at one-sixtieth of its normal rate her breathing must change as well. Hattie must not have felt the need to explain her take. It’s your own breathing it was and it’s your own breathing it would be.

And yet John Bowie opened the door on this one, sitting across from Carol at Finn’s, Harrows’s finer seafood saloon.

At risk of sounding morbid, Carol, I’d at least consider that the coma could be a new place, indeed. Have you considered that the coma is a plane of its own? A sort of nonreligious purgatory? Perhaps the coma is between life and death. And the breathing you hear is…not of this world.

As interesting as it was to discuss over dinner, these words were much more frightening when falling through the darkness. And sometimes Carol wished John had never spoken them.

Like now. Falling, still able to see the threshold she fell toward, still able to see the ripple roll across the garden toward her. And yet what if John Bowie was right? What if the dead she heard breathing was dead John himself?

Carol quickly, forcibly shoved these thoughts aside. Right now she needed to do more than remember. She needed to do more than weigh the words of two incredible people she loved.

She needed to act.

Roll over.

But how? She didn’t know exactly. She’d never tried before. It seemed simple, in theory: If a wind was pressing against her, wouldn’t a slight tilt to the right or left roll her over completely?

Carol felt the electricity, the burning nerves of anxiety. She imagined herself rolling, unable to stop, spinning like John Bowie’s toy top forever.

And the steady hoarse rhythm was getting louder.

It’s your own breathing. This time it was Carol herself who said this. Of course it was her own breathing. And it made perfect sense. She was exerting herself, trying to rotate in the darkness, to feel the wind against her back for the first time ever in the coma.

To fall up, perhaps, instead.

She was working. It was something.

Long ago, Hattie built a pulley contraption that rolled on wheels, followed Carol wherever she went. And the moment Carol fell, limp, it held her up in a standing position. Carol experienced one coma that way, standing. But there was no change within. Still the sensation of falling.

Still…

So how to beat it? How to…climb out?

Roll over.

She tried. Oh, how she tried. Such a natural movement, a tilt to either the right or the left, a simple inch would do. And yet…she couldn’t.

Heavier wheezing from the darkness and Carol continued to tell herself it was her own. Her body was slowed down in the coma. It wasn’t labored breathing she was hearing but the grains-of-sand details of a regularly expelled exhalation, amplified in Howltown. Inhale. Exhale. All her own.

Carol concentrated on the roll. Rolling over.

Once, as a young girl, Hattie helped Carol up the wood ladder of a metal slide. From the top, it looked like a hundred-foot drop. Scared but exhilarated, Carol let go of Hattie’s hand and came softly to the dirt at the slide’s end. For this, Carol would call out for Hattie when the collapse came, when the free fall toward an impossible distance occurred…this slide with no wood ladder, no reality from which to discharge…not even the convincing cold metal of the slide beneath her…and, most frightening of all, no lip, no dirt, no end. Yet the sensation was always toward the earth. Often Carol imagined the fall carried her into the earth, cracking its crust like a child’s pi?ata, falling farther…deeper…never into a variety of muted light, but into the black solid black that dizzied her with misdirection, unease, confusion, lest a stone wall wait at the end there to greet her.

Or, here, a stone slab.

If you know you’re on your back in the workroom, Hattie once said, then maybe you can plant your hands against it, whether it exists in the coma or not. Maybe you can still sit up without waking.

Now, trying so hard to focus on the slab, to roll, it felt to Carol as if every coma previous to this one constituted one continuous fall.

The breathing. Closer now.

In her mind’s eye Carol saw her friend John Bowie sitting up in his grave. Barefoot and unboxed, he raised his right hand as if about to suggest something.

Then Carol felt a hand upon her shoulder.

John!

But this was not the hand of John Bowie. This was no friend. The burn she felt from its subfreezing temperature told her so.

Carol tried to look, tried to see who had touched her, if such a thing was possible at all. But turning her head was just as impossible as turning her body, and so Carol only stared into the darkness through which she fell.