WITH LEAD HE SHADED LOVE INTO THE woman’s eyes.
As one who had no talent except for magic at the griddle and grill, I watched with respect as Jacob created her from memory as he made real on paper what was in his mind and what was evidently lost to him except by the grace of his art.
When I had given him time to proceed but had gotten not another word from him, I said, “Who wants you dead, Jacob?”
“The Neverwas.”
“Help me understand.”
“The Neverwas came once to see, and Jacob was full of the black, and the Neverwas said, ‘Let him die.’ “
“He came here to this room?”
Jacob shook his head. “A long time ago the Neverwas came, before the ocean and the bell and the floating away.”
“Why do you call him the Neverwas?”
“That’s his name.”
“He must have another name.”
“No. He’s the Neverwas, and we don’t care.”
“I never heard anyone named the Neverwas before.”
Jacob said, “Never heard no one named the Odd Thomas before.”
“All right. Fair enough.”
Employing an X-Acto knife, Jacob shaved the point on the pencil.
Watching him, I wished that I could whittle my dull brain to a sharper point. If only I could understand something about the scheme of simple metaphors in which he spoke, I might be able to crack the code of his conversation.
I had made some progress, figuring out that when he said “the dark is gonna come with the dark,” he meant that death was coming tonight or some night soon.
Although his drawing ability made him a savant, that was the extent of his special talent. Jacob wasn’t clairvoyant. His warning of oncoming death was not a presentiment.
He had seen something, heard something, knew something that I had not seen, had not heard, did not know. His conviction that death loomed was based on hard evidence, not on supernatural perception.
Now that the pencil wood had been cut away, he put down the X-Acto knife and used a sandpaper block to sharpen the point of the lead.
Brooding about the riddle that was Jacob, I stared at the snow falling thicker and faster than ever past the window, so thick that maybe you could drown out there, trying to breathe but your lungs filling up with snow.
“Jacob’s dumb,” he said, “but not stupid.”
When I shifted my attention from the window, I discovered he was looking at me for the first time.
“That must be another Jacob,” I said. “I don’t see dumb here.”
At once he shifted his eyes to the pencil, and he put aside the sandpaper block. In a different, singsong voice, he said, “Dumb as a duck run down by a truck.”
“Dumb doesn’t draw like Michelangelo.”
“Dumb as a cow knocked flat by a plow.”
“You’re repeating something you heard, aren’t you?”
“Dumb as a mutt with his nose up his butt.”
“No more,” I said softly. “Okay? No more.”
“There’s lots more.”
“I don’t want to hear. It hurts me to hear this.”
He seemed surprised. “Hurts why?”
“Because I like you, Jake. I think you’re special.”
He was silent. His hands trembled, and the pencil ticked against the table. He glanced at me, heartbreaking vulnerability in his eyes. He shyly looked away.
“Who said those things to you?” I asked.
“You know. Kids.”
“Kids here at Saint Bart’s?”
“No. Kids before the ocean and the bell and the floating away.”
In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness that is with us every day, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.
“Before the ocean and the bell and the floating away,” Jacob repeated.
“Those kids were just jealous. Jake, see, you could do something better than anything they could do.”
“Not Jacob.”
“Yes, you.”
He sounded dubious: “What could I do better?”
“Draw. Of all the things they could do that you couldn’t, there wasn’t one thing they could do as well as you can draw. So they were jealous and called you names and made fun of you — to make themselves feel better.”
He stared at his hands until the tremors stopped, until the pencil was steady, and then he continued working on the portrait.
His resiliency was not the resiliency of the dumb but of a lamb who can remember hurt but cannot sustain the anger or the bitterness that brittles the heart.
“Not stupid,” he said. “Jacob knows what he seen.”
I waited, then said, “What did you see, Jake?”
“Them.”
“Who?”
“Not scared of them.”
“Of who?”
“Them and the Neverwas.
Not scared of them. Jacob’s only scared he’ll float wrong when the dark comes. Never seen where the bell rung, wasn’t there when the bell rung, and the ocean it moves, it always moves, so where the bell rung is gone somewhere new.”
We had come full circle. In fact I felt as if I had been on a merry-go-round too long.
My wristwatch read 10:16.
I was willing to go around and around some more, in the hope that I would be enlightened instead of dizzied.
Sometimes enlightenment descends upon you when you least expect it: like the time that I and a smiling Japanese chiropractor, who was also an herbalist, were hanging side by side, bound with rope, from a rack in a meat locker.
Some difficult guys with no respect for alternative medicine or human life were intending to return to the meat locker and torture us to get information they wanted. They were not seeking the most effective herbal formula to cure athlete’s foot or anything like that. They wanted to tear from us information regarding the whereabouts of a large sum of cash.
Our situation was made more dire by the fact that the difficult guys were mistaken; we didn’t have the information they wanted. After hours of torturing us, all they would get for their effort would be the fun of hearing us scream, which probably would have been all right with them if they’d also had a case of beer and some chips.
The chiropractor-herbalist spoke maybe forty-seven words of English, and I only spoke two words of Japanese that I could recall under pressure. Although we were highly motivated to escape before our captors returned with an array of pliers, a blowtorch, cattle prods, a CD of the Village People singing Wagner, and other fiendish instruments, I didn’t think we could conspire successfully when my two words of Japanese were sushi and sake.
For half an hour, our relationship was marked by my sputtering frustration and by his unshakable patience. To my surprise, with a series of ingenious facial expressions, eight words that included spaghetti and linguini and Houdini and tricky, he managed to make me understand that in addition to being a chiropractor and an herbalist, he was a contortionist who had once had a nightclub act when he had been younger.
He was not as limber as in his youth, but with my cooperation, he managed to use various parts of my body as stepping-stones to eel backward and up to the rack from which we were suspended, where he chewed through a knot and freed himself, then freed me.
We stay in touch. From time to time he sends me pictures from Tokyo, mostly of his kids. And I send him little boxes of dried, chocolate-covered California dates, which he adores.
Now, sitting across the table from Jacob, I figured that if I could be even half as patient as the smiling chiropractor-herbalist-contortionist, and if I kept in mind that to my Japanese friend I must have seemed as impenetrable as Jacob seemed to me, I might in time not only puzzle out the meaning of Jacob’s oblique conversation but might also tease from him the thing that he seemed to know, the vital detail, that would help me understand what terror was fast approaching St. Bartholomew’s.
Unfortunately, Jacob was no longer talking. When I had first sat down at the table, he’d been mum. Now he was mum to twenty powers of ten. Nothing existed for him except the drawing on which he worked.
I tried more conversational gambits than a lonely logomaniac at a singles’ bar. Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent. After five minutes, I exhausted my tolerance for the sound of my voice.
Although Jacob sat here in the tick of time that bridges past and future, he had cast his mind back to another day before the ocean and the bell and the floating away, whatever that might mean.
Rather than waste time pecking at him until I wore my beak down to a nub, I got to my feet and said, “I’ll come back this afternoon, Jacob.”
If he looked forward to the pleasure of my company, he did a superb job of concealing his delight.
I scanned the framed portraits on the walls and said, “She was your mother, wasn’t she?”
Not even that question drew a reaction from him. Painstakingly, he restored her to life with the power of the pencil.
CHAPTER 22
AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF THE SECOND floor, Sister Miriam was on duty at the nurses’ station.
If Sister Miriam grips her lower lip with two fingers and pulls it down to reveal the pink inner surface, you will see a tattoo in blue ink, Deo gratias, which is Latin for “Thanks be to God.”
This is not a statement of commitment required of nuns. If it were, the world would probably have even fewer nuns than it does now.
Long before she ever considered the life of the convent, Sister Miriam had been a social worker in Los Angeles, an employee of the federal government. She worked with teenage girls from disadvantaged families, striving to rescue them from gang life and other horrors.
Most of this I know from Sister Angela, the mother superior, because Sister Miriam not only doesn’t toot her own horn — she does not have a horn to toot.
As a challenge to a girl named Jalissa, an intelligent fourteen-year-old who had great promise but who had been on the gang path and about to acquire a gang tattoo, Miriam had said, Girl, what do I have to do to make you think how you’re trading a full life for a withered one? I talk sense to you, but it doesn’t matter. I cry for you, you’re amused. Do I have to bleed for you to get your attention?
She then offered a deal: If Jalissa would promise, for thirty days, to stay away from friends who were in a gang or who hung out with a gang, and if she would not get a gang tattoo the following day as she intended, Miriam would take her at her word and would have her own inner lip tattooed with what she called “a symbol of my gang.”
An audience of twelve at-risk girls, including Jalissa, gathered to watch, wince, and squirm as the tattooist performed his needlework.
Miriam refused topical anesthetics. She had chosen the tender tissue of the inner lip because the cringe factor would impress the girls. She bled. Tears flowed, but she made not one sound of pain.
That level of commitment and the inventive ways she expressed it made Miriam an effective counselor. These years later, Jalissa has two college degrees and is an executive in the hotel industry.
Miriam rescued many other girls from lives of crime, squalor, and depravity. You might expect that one day she would become the subject of a movie with Halle Berry in the title role.
Instead, a parent complained about the spiritual element that was part of Miriam’s counseling strategy. As a government employee, she was sued by an organization of activist attorneys on the grounds of separation of church and state. They wanted her to cut spiritual references from her counseling, and they insisted that Deo gratias be either obscured with another tattoo or expunged. They believed that in the privacy of counseling sessions, she would peel down her lip and corrupt untold numbers of young girls.
You might think this case would be laughed out of court, but you would be as wrong as you were about the Halle
Berry movie. The court sided with the activists.
Ordinarily, government employees are not easily canned. Their unions will fight ferociously to save the job of an alcoholic clerk who shows up at work only three days a week and then spends a third of his workday in a toilet stall, tippling from a flask or vomiting.
Miriam was an embarrassment to her union and received only token support. Eventually she accepted a modest severance package.
For a few years thereafter, she held less satisfying jobs before she heard the call to the life she now leads.
Standing behind the counter at the nurses’ station, reviewing inventory sheets, she looked up as I approached and said, “Well, here comes young Mr. Thomas in his usual clouds of mystery.”
Unlike Sister Angela, Abbot Bernard, and Brother Knuckles, she had not been told of my special gift. My universal key and privileges intrigued her, however, and she seemed to intuit something of my true nature.
“I’m afraid you mistake my perpetual state of bafflement for an air of mystery, Sister Miriam.”
If they ever did make a movie about her, the producers would hew closer to the truth if they cast Queen Latifah instead of Halle
Berry. Sister Miriam has Latifah’s size and royal presence, and perhaps even more charisma than the actress.
She regards me always with friendly but gimlet-eyed interest, as though she knows that I’m getting away with something even if it’s not something terribly naughty.
“Thomas is an English name,” she said, “but there must be Irish blood in your family, considering how you spread blarney as smooth as warm butter on a muffin.”
“No Irish blood, I’m afraid. Although if you knew my family, you would agree that I come from strange blood.”
“You’re not looking at a surprised nun, are you, dear?”
“No, Sister. You don’t look at all surprised. Could I ask you a few questions about Jacob, in Room Fourteen?”
“The woman he draws is his mother.”
From time to time, Sister Miriam seems just a little psychic herself.
“His mother.
That’s what I figured. When did she die?”
“Twelve years ago, of cancer, when he was thirteen. He was very close to her. She seems to have been a devoted, loving person.”
“What about his father?”
Distress puckered her plum-dark face. “I don’t believe he was ever in the picture. The mother never married. Before her death, she arranged for Jacob’s care at another church facility. When we opened, he was transferred here.”