The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 17: The Lamp in the Gray Room

Somewhere around the four-hundredth name, Leanne’s voice began to blur.

I knew it wasn’t hers. It was Victor’s hearing going. Her words arrived a half second late and farther away each time, like somebody reading to him from the far end of a long hallway. The monitor’s count had slowed to something I could have kept time to with my thumb. Behind the curtain, the ER carried on: a gurney’s squeak, a phone ringing, a nurse laughing too loudly at something and then stopping.

“Gladys Owens,” Leanne read. “Eighty-one. Widow of Arthur.”

She sent me a Christmas card, Victor said, in the gray room. Last year. I never opened it.

You can open it now.

Yes. A breath. I think I’d like that.

His body was giving out. I felt it the way you feel a tide going out under a pier. There was no pain, which surprised me. The fist behind his breastbone had unclenched somewhere around the three-hundredth name, and what was left was a heaviness that was almost pleasant, like lying down in the back of a truck after a long job.

His eyes opened, just a little.

“Lee. My jacket.”

She stopped reading. “What about it?”

“Inside pocket. Left side. There’s a piece of paper.”

She looked at him for a second, then reached over the rail for the jacket the paramedics had cut open and left folded over the chair. Her fingers went through the lining and came out with a slip of thermal receipt paper, the kind that curls at the edges. She smoothed it out on the blanket.

“What is this?”

“I don’t know.” His voice was almost gone. “I found it Tuesday. In the elevator, when I went to put my hand in my pocket for my keys. It wasn’t there that morning.” A flicker of a smile. “I thought it was somebody’s idea of a joke.”

Leanne held it under the light.

I couldn’t see it from the back of the gray room. But Victor was looking, so I looked through him, and the words came into focus one by one, in the cheap gray print of an old register.

KOWALCZYK’S BAKERY

Fillmore Ave., Buffalo NY

RYE LOAF (DAY-OLD) ... 1.49

THANK YOU. COME AGAIN.

The floor of the gray room dropped out from under me.

“Buffalo,” Leanne said, puzzled. “You’ve never been to Buffalo.”

“No,” Victor said.

I didn’t hear the rest. The receipt had gone white in my mind, as though somebody had set a match to it. Day-old rye. A paper bag gone soft on the bottom. I knew that bakery. I’d walked past its window four nights a week for six years. I’d stood at that counter at ten past ten, counting out coins, with snow melting off my collar.

It wasn’t a coincidence. A thing from my dead life had been put in a stranger’s pocket, in a different city, in a different world, and left there for me to find.

Who put it there? I said. Victor. Who put this in your pocket?

I don’t know, he said, and I felt him turn toward me in the dark, puzzled, kind. But it was meant for you, wasn’t it? I think it was. It had the feeling of something addressed.

The lamp in the gray room was burning very low now. Victor had come to the doorway of it and was standing there, a thin, tired man in a crumpled suit, looking out at the dark with something like curiosity.

I didn’t get to ask your name, he said.

I don’t have one. It was nearly true. Not a working one.

That’s all right. He smiled, and it was a real one, the first I’d seen from him. Thank you for waiting for me. Most people wouldn’t have. I’d have walked right off that roof.

You’d have come back down.

Maybe. He considered it. I’d like to think so.

On the bed, his hand had gone slack in Leanne’s. She hadn’t noticed yet. She was still looking at the receipt, her brow creased, and then she looked up and saw his face, and everything in hers went quiet.

“Vic?”

The monitor drew a long, level line.

It wasn’t dramatic. I’d braced for it to be. Nobody shouted or ran. The line simply stopped, and the sound it made was thin and even and almost gentle. Out beyond the curtain the world kept going. A phone rang. Somebody laughed. Leanne sat with her husband’s hand in both of hers, and she didn’t say a word, and she didn’t let go.

Goodbye, Lee, Victor said, softly, to the woman who couldn’t hear him.

The lamp in the gray room went out.

It went out the way a candle does when you stop cupping it, with a small, plain nothing. And what was left in the dark wasn’t a figure on the floor or a man in a doorway. It was just a room, and an open window, and a draft that smelled faintly of cold air and snow.

Cal, said a voice beside me, and it wasn’t Victor’s.

I turned.

The Intercessor stood in the empty room with his hands at his sides. His outline wavered as if he were standing in heat. For the first time I could see something of his face, not the features, just the expression, which was unbearably tired.

“Let go now,” he said quietly. “He’s done.”

I looked at the receipt in my memory, the gray type, the small price. “Who put that in his pocket?”

“Let go.”

“You know. You’ve always known.”

The floor of the gray room began to shiver. A pulse ran through it, warm, then cold, then warm. The edges of everything started to fold in.

“Let go, Cal,” the Intercessor said, and his voice cracked like a boy’s. “Please. Not here.”

I didn’t want to. I stood there with my hands curled, staring at the place where his face wasn’t, and I understood that he was frightened. Not of me. Of what I was going to ask next.

Then the dark closed over my head and took me down.