Shadow Man: A Novel Read Free Page B

the bank when he was aiming for the grocery store. I look at the woman in white. Then to the mirror. “That’s you, James. Hurry up, we’ve got to get you ready. Eva is coming today.” I can’t recall who Eva might be, maybe another woman in white. Flowers sit in a vase on a table near the bed, and there’s a little desk in the corner under the window. The desk is covered in papers and books. “Are yougoing to write today, James?” I don’t know. Is that what I do? The woman in white pours me juice and hands me a pill. I seem to know what to do, so this must have happened a million times, although if it did, the woman in white should know I prefer grapefruit juice to orange juice. Prefer comes from preferential. The woman in white pulls up the shade, and for a moment she disappears in the light that rushes into the room. “A new day, James.” I guess it is.
    “Where am I?”
    “You’re where you’ve been for the last two years. St. Jude’s home.”
    “Is this heaven?”
    The woman in white laughs as if I’ve made a joke, but I feel completely serious.
    “No, James, this is earth.”
    “What city?”
    “Philadelphia.”
    “Philadelphia.”
    “You were born here, not far from where you’re sitting right now, if you look out that window across the rooftops and the steeples. There’s not as many steeples as there used to be, with churches moving out to the suburbs and leaving us in a city without God.”
    “God is a concept by which we measure our pain. John Lennon said that.”
    “Well, I don’t know about John Lennon, but seems like a little of that memory of yours is kicking in. Might be one of the good days.”
    “John Lennon was a Beatle. The best one in my opinion, although Paul had a gift for melody. The others I can’t remember. Who’s Eva?”
    “You know who Eva is, James. Think.”
    The woman in white lays out my clothes on the bed as if I’m a child. Khakis, a blue buttondown shirt, gray socks, a brown braided belt. She says I need a shave and leads me to the bathroom and sets me in front of the big mirror over the sink. She runs the water, handsme a razor and a can of shaving cream. She leans against the wall and watches. I have two thoughts: Why am I here? And if I know what to do with a razor and shaving cream, why can’t I remember this lady Eva who is coming to visit me? The razor scrapes. It’s a sound I know well, a soft sound, like sand on waxed paper. Every shave peels away a mask and brings a new man. I seem to know this analogy; maybe it’s from Kurt, maybe from those times when I was a boy standing in the bathroom watching him the way this woman in white is watching me. It’s a nice thought, to be new. I finish shaving and am pointed toward the shower. The woman in white steps outside the door, but leaves it open a crack. The water runs hard and warm; it feels good, washing away the clenched feeling the face has after a shave. I dry and put on my clothes. The bed is made and I sit on it. I smell of powder and deodorant. The vase on the table holds flowers; they look fresh.
    A man, a doctor, slips into the room and asks me questions and writes things on a clipboard. He says I have a far-back but not close memory; my childhood vivid, my adulthood dormant, colorless. What I see, witness, experience one day disappears the next, like that shiny plastic paper I wrote on as a kid; when you lifted the paper off the inky board, whatever you had drawn was gone so you could begin anew. There are, apparently, endless analogies for what’s happening to my shriveling mind. A small part of my brain resembles a glacier with deep recesses sunlight cannot penetrate. He says it’s like when ice climbers descend into a fissure and the light dims as they dangle on ropes in the darkness. The doctor says there will be fewer fissures of light, and eventually all will be black, except for an occasional flash of unexplained lightning that may revive a memory for a few seconds or maybe an hour,