Read Online Waking the Dead by Scott Spencer - Free Book Online Page A

I’d been keeping away from alcohol for four years now, but it still felt awkward to refuse. I had never been a completely out-of-control drunk—I never lost my job, never was arrested. But I was what they call a chronic drinker. Or at least that’s what I called it. I’d beat back the habit on my own, but it was never very far away.
    “Oh,” said Carmichael, “it’s like that? I didn’t know. Well, you better watch your ass down in Washington. You won’t believe how they drink down there.”
    “I’ll be careful, Jerry,” I said. I turned my back to him as I dressed for the trip home; I could feel him looking at me, felt him stirring. I moved slowly, taking care to wrap my scarf neatly, buttoning my overcoat, flipping the collar up.
    “I really do wish I didn’t have to be alone tonight,” he said in a cheerful voice. “Oh well. I can always make phone calls. Or shoot myself. Ha ha.”
    I turned to look at him for a last time. “Don’t shoot yourself, Jerry. All right?”
    He smiled, perhaps a little embarrassed. “OK,” he said. He buttoned his jacket and patted the almost imperceptible bulge.
    “If you’d wanted to fight this thing,” I said, “I would have supported you.”
    His lips were pressed together, though he was still smiling, and he shook his head no.
    “It’s a witchhunt, Jerry. You got a shitty deal.”
    He continued to make that tight-lipped smile and continued to shake his head no. “It’s OK,” he said. “A little rest. It’ll be fine. We’ll talk tomorrow, OK? I mean, you know, if possible. Go over some things. We’ve got a lot in process I want to, ah, familiarize you with.”
    I felt a flash of affection for Carmichael, yet I knew if I resisted any outward show of emotion I would be glad later. I put my hands in my pockets and fished out my gloves. I put them on, nodded, and let myself out the door.
    “This is all going to be just fine,” he was saying. “We just got to keep this thing going, right? Keep it going.”
    When I got down to the street, three more inches of snow had fallen and my old Mercury, spinning its wheels, dug a sooty ice pit for itself. I rocked it back and forth and got nowhere. I was in a cloud of exhaust fumes and beyond that cloud the snow was falling faster and faster. I gave up on the car and got out, figuring it wasn’t a very long walk.
    I made my way toward home, the only thing moving in the dark, arctic streets. The snow was gray-blue drifts on the ground. I stepped in new snow and sunk once to my knees. The blizzard and the wind were starting to play with my senses. One foot in front of the other. Don’t think. Just walk. Like AA. One step at a time.
    I’d only gone two blocks when the street lamps blinked twice and then went black. The lights in the windows along the way suddenly disappeared. A spurt of terror went through me and then I calmly explained to myself that it was a power failure. We’d had one in an earlier storm. It had lasted only twenty minutes. I heard a muffled shout from one of the apartments along the way. But I could see virtually nothing. A great stillness settled over this snowy quadrangle of world, a stillness only I disturbed.
    And it was then, at that moment in the snow, in that darkness, that aloneness, with the full bewildering weight of the day upon me, that suddenly Sarah was with me—not her face, nor her voice, but just the specificity of her weight in eternity. I felt her in the snow. I knew she was gone, yet I sensed her so powerfully within me and in that fissure between what was known and what was felt, she was real. I felt my insides touched by her tender, ethereal fingers; her breath was in my lungs.
    “Sarah,” I said, my voice rising like steam, caught by the wind and carried away. Desire can resurrect the dead, loneliness can baffle the intellect. Was she there only because I longed for her? Dead almost five years now … It was the fourteenth of December. It was her birthday.
    Thirty-one