Chapter 13

"What shall I do?" he asked, still hoping that the raven would answer him. "What shall I do? What shall I do?" He stood in the grass with his hands in his pockets and his legs close together, as if it were windy, and he said, "What shall I do?" without remembering that Laura had said it. His legs ached, and his back felt stiff when he moved.

He ought to walk down to the gate, he knew, if he were ever to believe again in his fiction of being useful to the dead. Laura would be there, and in need of someone. It was clearly his place to go to her and be consoling, affectionate, and gently wise. He had seen more of life than she, and known more of death; so, naturally, the word that would make her wise too must come from him. It was fitting. Anyway, there was no one else now.

But he did not want to go alone. He asked the raven to come with him, even part of the way, but the bird said no, and flew away. Mr. Rebeck watched him as long as he could, because he thought the raven flew beautifully. He felt listless and lonely when the raven was gone. A little while ago he had been sitting with three friends; now there was only himself on the hillside, and the transition was too sudden for him. He wondered if very old men felt that way. Perhaps children did, children who had fallen asleep in a room full of light, and pleasant smells, and the sounds of silver and glass, and wakened much later, alone in a strange bed in the middle of the night, in a room that might have been friendly and familiar once, but was no more.

Even without the raven along for company, he would go and find Laura. Someone should be with her now. He took a few slow steps down the hill and then stopped, bracing his legs against the slope. Below him, the grave was a brown bald spot on the earth. He wondered how long it would be before the grass covered it again.

"She will be by the gate," he said, "and there will be a few marks on the ground where the truck has passed." It was easy enough to imagine her, a frantic whisper in front of the mockingly open gate, crying out to the black iron to let her through. He did not like to think about it. It made him feel as if he had no legs.

"I cannot help her." He said it very loudly, looking around him. As far as he could see, there was no one. He waited for a moment, as if he were hoping that someone would challenge him; then he turned and walked back up the small hill to the scrawny dirt road that ran from it. Once he looked back and saw the deep scars in the earth that the heavy truck had made. They would fill with water when it rained again, and in time, weeds would grow out of them.

But he could not slam his mind against Laura. The moment he relaxed, the moment he ran out of things to think about the goodness of the day, she returned and stood like a torch in the middle of his mind. He drove her away by admiring the beauty of some flowers, but she returned again, more beautiful, with her black hair and gray dress and dead-of-winter eyes, saying, "It's not working. I'm sorry Jonathan."

"There was nothing I could do," he said to her. "I was the wrong man to ask for help. Would you rather I had promised to help you, and then disappointed you? At least I was man enough to face my own weakness. It is not everyone who is honest enough to do that."

Laura said nothing. Instead she retreated quietly to the back of his mind, where she remained, glimmering in shadow. He told her again, that she was wasting her time, and hurting him into the bargain, but she did not answer.

Even the trains were silent. There was an elevated train running past one side of the cemetery, and a subway on the other side, so that he thought of the trains as his fences against the city. He liked the noises they made. At night, in the slippery moments before he fell asleep, their deep clattering and cat-shrieks made him feel less alone. He knew their schedules by heart, and he knew that it had been too long a time since he had heard a train go by.

Laura has stopped the trains, he thought, or at least she had made them run without noise, so that I might be free to concentrate on feeling guilty. He knew, of course, that this was not true. Undoubtedly the trains were running as they always had. He was simply not hearing them.

The road widened and became pavement, and he walked on, saying to himself, I can understand her point of view very easily. She cannot imagine a living man not being able to walk in and out of the cemetery as he chooses. She has seen men do it every day. They are undoubtedly doing it now, as she kneels by the gate. In and out they walk, so confident of themselves that they do not break their strides in the least as they pass through the gate. Even Campos—and Campos is very much like me. She does not see why it should be such a hard thing for me to do. Well, neither do I, really, except that this place is not merely the place where I live, the place where I sleep. It is my skin, and a man only walks out of the skin of his body with a great deal of difficulty, and much pain afterward. I am afraid of pain, and pain is cold and aging and being useless. I should have made Laura understand that.

He was coming to a more well-to-do section of the cemetery. Then, farther on, the mausoleums began to thin out. The last one was an old favorite, a large cylindrical building, based on three concentric marble circles which formed steps leading up to a small glass door with a cross on top. The whole thing reminded Mr. Rebeck of the head and shoulders of a knight. The cupola would be the helmet, he thought, the door the mouth-opening, and the three steps the whatever-it-was that protected the throat. A bas-relief band ran all around the mausoleum, exactly where the knight's forehead would be. It was carved deeply with a pattern of crossed swords tangled in vine leaves. That might be the knight's lucky piece, if they had such things, or a favor from a rich lady. Perhaps the knight had merely stood still for a moment, or fallen asleep, and the world had risen around him, like a pile of dead leaves. It could have happened. It was one of the things about the world that frightened him. You closed your eyes for a little while, and when you opened them again you were up to your shoulders in earth and dead leaves. You had to be awake all the time, and moving.

"The animals outside are rapidly becoming the animals inside," Laura said in his mind.

"No, they aren't," he answered irritably. "Fear has stopped at the gate of this place. If I left, it would be on me again, but it cannot follow me here. I am safe here, and nothing can harm me."

"If there is nothing you fear," Laura said from a great distance, "then you are not a man."

"Did I ever claim to be?" he demanded, feeling that he had scored an important point against her. "Manhood is not something you put on and take off and put on again. It is not a reward for courage. There is no prize of manhood waiting for me if I am brave enough to leave the cemetery. I am neither man nor ghost. For your sake I wish I were the one, for my sake I wish I were the other. As it is, I can help neither of us. Try not to blame me. It is not altogether my fault."

A patrol car honked behind him, and he stepped quickly aside to let it pass. They still made him nervous, and he still tried to turn his face away from the driver, but he no longer thought to run and hide when he saw one of the black cars with the oak-leaf insignia on the sides. He walked along the road, occasionally reaching out a hand to stroke the green, sharp fur of the small pine trees that grew in this area. Only a few of them had been there when he had first come to live in the cemetery.

"Anyway," he said, although the Laura in his mind had said nothing, "it isn't only the idea of leaving the cemetery. Suppose I were not able to come back? Suppose I could never live here again?"