to take a pulse, and saw four purple bruises lined up on the old man’s stick of a forearm. Late-stage leukemia patients bruised if you even breathed on them, but these were finger-bruises, and Dan knew perfectly well where they had come from. He had more control over his temper now that he was sober, but it was still there, just like the occasional strong urge to take a drink.
Carling, you bastard. Wouldn’t he move quick enough for you? Or were you just mad to have to be cleaning up a nosebleed when all you wanted to do was read magazines and eat those fucking yellow crackers?
He tried not to show what he was feeling, but Azzie seemed to sense it; he gave a small, troubled meow. Under other circumstances, Dan might have asked questions, but now he had more pressing matters to deal with. Azzie was right again. He only had to touch the old man to know.
“I’m pretty scared,” Charlie said. His voice was little more than a whisper. The low, steady moan of the wind outside was louder. “I didn’t think I would be, but I am.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of.”
Instead of taking Charlie’s pulse—there was really no point—he took one of the old man’s hands in his. He saw Charlie’s twin sons at four, on swings. He saw Charlie’s wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom, wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he’d bought her for their first anniversary; saw how her ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him, her face lit in a smile that was all yes. He saw a Farmall tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat. He smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly with Me” from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a worktable littered with tools. He saw a hubcap full of rain reflecting a red barn. He tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant lake whose surface was dappled by steady autumn rain. He was sixty, dancing with his wife in the American Legion hall. He was thirty, splitting wood. He was five, wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon. Then the pictures blurred together, the way cards do when they’re shuffled in the hands of an expert, and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains, and in here was the silence and Azzie’s solemn watching eyes. At times like this, Dan knew what he was for. At times like this he regretted none of the pain and sorrow and anger and horror, because they had brought him here to this room while the wind whooped outside. Charlie Hayes had come to the border.
“I’m not scared of hell. I lived a decent life, and I don’t think there is such a place, anyway. I’m scared there’s nothing.” He struggled for breath. A pearl of blood was swelling in the corner of his right eye. “There was nothing before, we all know that, so doesn’t it stand to reason that there’s nothing after?”
“But there is.” Dan wiped Charlie’s face with the damp cloth. “We never really end, Charlie. I don’t know how that can be, or what it means, I only know that it is.”
“Can you help me get over? They say you can help people.”
“Yes. I can help.” He took Charlie’s other hand, as well. “It’s just going to sleep. And when you wake up—you will wake up—everything is going to be better.”
“Heaven? Do you mean heaven?”
“I don’t know, Charlie.”
The power was very strong tonight. He could feel it flowing through their clasped hands like an electric current and cautioned himself to be gentle. Part of him was inhabiting the faltering body that was shutting down and the failing senses
(hurry up please)
that were turning off. He was inhabiting a mind
(hurry up please it’s time)
that was still as sharp as ever, and aware it was thinking its last thoughts . . . at least as Charlie Hayes.
The bloodshot eyes closed, then opened again. Very slowly.
“Everything’s all right,” Dan said. “You only need sleep. Sleep will make you better.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Yes. I call it sleep, and it’s safe to sleep.”
“Don’t go.”
“I won’t. I’m with you.” So he was. It was his terrible privilege.
Charlie’s eyes closed again. Dan closed his own and saw a slow blue pulse in the darkness. Once . . . twice . . . stop. Once . . . twice . . . stop. Outside