Severed

My friend Alex was 12 years old when it happened. Years later, he told me it was like time had stopped the instant his father parked the car on top of the railroad tracks on Spring Street, pulled the keys from the ignition, and tossed them out the window. I’ve always imagined Alex, his mother, and his younger sister looking at each other in stunned silence as the father closed his eyes and calmly surrendered to the universe, which he believed had defeated him at every turn.

What Alex described as an eternity of terrifying suspense, from the train’s perspective, lasted only a few brief seconds. The crash killed them all except Alex, who suffered a severed spine, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. Now he was alone, and the only one left with any insight into how it had all gone so wrong. How what seemed like a happy home from the outside was so twisted and broken on the inside that his father saw no way out other than killing them all, and then had fallen short of even that horrific goal.

But Alex rarely talked about any of that. For him, his history, not just his spine, was severed. It was as if his life had started over in a new body.

Our fathers had been friends and business partners, and our families had spent many evenings together, along with Saturday barbecues and a couple of vacations. After getting out of the hospital and finishing rehab, Alex went to live with an aunt and uncle a few towns away, but we never lost touch. He told me once that there were times when he wasn’t sure the accident had really happened, or that there was ever a time before—a time when he was physically whole. He said there were also times when he woke up from a sound sleep expecting to stand up and walk.

Shortly after I bought Murphy’s Twin Shamrocks back in the early 1980s, I traded up from my small office on the second floor of the same building for a suite down the hall, then sublet half of it to Alex. (He did investment counseling, and I was a CPA.) He also took an apartment on the third floor. I still had mine on the sixth. Alex didn’t go out much—not because of his injuries, but because he felt he had everything he needed right there. Work, home, and Murphy’s, all under one roof.

The hum of the wheelchair’s motor and the whirring of rubber tires on the tiled floor always alerted Sophie of Alex’s arrival. Not that she needed alerting. Alex was what you’d call punctual. To avoid the crowded lunch hour, every afternoon at precisely 2:50, he would roll off the elevator, across the lobby, and into Murphy’s. Sophie would be pouring his beer by 2:55, and he’d be sipping it by 2:57.

Alex’s wheelchair wasn’t high enough for him to “belly up to the bar.” Soon after he had moved into his apartment, though, Sophie and I had removed two stools at the end of the bar and installed a small table in their place, next to the opening where the bartender passes in and out. No one else ever sat there, since there were no chairs set at it. It was Alex’s table.

Sophie protected Alex, shielded him like a guardian angel. To be fair, she was a bit like that with everyone. But more so with Alex. Not because of his paralysis, but because he was a genuinely sweet person, innocent in ways that made him susceptible to other people taking advantage of him. I know I told you what a strong person he was, and that was true in terms of living with his paralysis, and his drive to not be defined by his personal tragedy and physical limitations. But in other ways, he was like a lamb ready to be led to the slaughter. He was so honest and sincere that he often failed to see the lack of integrity in others.

On the day I want to tell you about—Tuesday, March 26, 1988—Alex was at his table at the end of the bar, as he was almost every day. Once he’d finished his meal, Sophie cleared away the dishes and asked him, “Ready for another beer?”

“You know I am.”

I was there, too, sitting next to Fred Hennessey at the other end of the bar, by the door to the street. Fred was Sophie’s brother-in-law. He had moved to an island in the Caribbean a few years earlier and was in town for an exhibit of his paintings at a local gallery. Standing on the other side of Fred was Tess Webber, Sophie’s best friend, who was about to start her shift as waitress. The three of us were reminiscing about the day when Fred had assisted Sophie with the delivery of Tess’s baby in the little room behind the bar, eighteen years earlier.

About mid-way between me and Alex sat a stranger, a man none of us had seen before.

The stranger was tall and almost impossibly fair-skinned, nearly translucent. He had thin white hair of no definite shape and no discernible eyebrows above his eyes, which were the lightest, faintest blue. He wore a light blue sport coat over a light pink shirt of nearly the same shade as the skin around his eyes. As unusual as his appearance was, the nearly total lack of color made him as easy to overlook as a shadow in an unlit room.

“Whatcha reading these days, Alex?” Sophie inquired as she polished the glasses she was taking out of the dishwasher.

Alex always had a book with him, and as he was enjoying his post-burger beer, he pulled the current one out and laid it on the table in front of him. “It’s called Chaos,” he answered. “About the development of chaos theory in modern physics, and its philosophical implications.”

“Oh, just a little light reading, I guess.” Sophie had a way of being both sarcastic and sweet at the same time, which was one of the many reasons we all loved her.

“Funny, Sophie. The fact is, even light behaves chaotically, if you look at it a certain way.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Alex.” She headed over to the stranger whose glass was empty. “Another beer?” Sophie asked him.

“Please,” he answered. “Is there a payphone nearby?”

“In the lobby, just to the left of the door,” Sophie answered as she put a full glass of beer before him on the bar top.

“Thanks.” He stood, unfolding his tall, thin frame with what appeared to be great effort, and ambled out through the door to the lobby. As he did, a woman entered through the same door. She was stunning, as hard to ignore as the pale man was hard to notice. She almost seemed to be followed by a spotlight, and all eyes in the room were drawn to her reflexively, like moths to a flame. Yet later, as we gave our statements to the police, none of us could agree on what she had looked like.

The woman took the stool between the one the stranger had just stepped away from and Alex’s table, and smiled in response to Sophie’s greeting. “A glass of chardonnay, please,” she said. Her voice was musical, with the hint of a European accent. So now the lineup, from Sophie’s left to right, was Fred (gin and tonic), me (stout), two unoccupied stools, the stranger’s temporarily empty one (with waiting beer), the stunning woman (chardonnay), and Alex (beer). Tess had moved out into the dining room, filling the salt and pepper shakers and the ketchup bottles to prepare for the dinner hour.

Chardonnay looked over at Alex and said, “Hello.”

Alex glanced up from his book and said, “Hi.” Then he went right back to his book, making no connection with the beautiful woman.

She tried again. “This is a nice place. Do you live nearby?”

Setting his book down with noticeable resignation and taking a sip of his beer, Alex responded, “Right upstairs. And yes, it is a nice place. Where are you from?”

“Oh, I live in California. San Bernadino. I’m here to visit my cousin Shirley. She’s quite sick, and I’m going to stay with her for a bit to help her out.”

“That’s very nice of you.”

“We’ve always been close. I know Shirley would do the same for me.”

“You’re lucky to have that kind of relationship.”

The nearly invisible stranger re-entered through the lobby door and silently ambled back toward the bar. Chardonnay asked Sophie for a menu. As Sophie bent down to retrieve one from below the bar, the stranger awkwardly attempted to fold himself back onto his stool. Stumbling, he bumped against Chardonnay, which saved him from falling—but caused her to spill her drink across the bar top and sent her tumbling over into Alex’s lap.

Sophie and I rushed to Alex’s side to make sure he was ok. He seemed so, once Chardonnay disentangled herself from him and his wheelchair.

After the confusion passed and everyone was upright again, the stranger said, “I am so sorry, I can’t believe I did that. Please, let me buy this young lady another drink. In fact, let me buy a round for all these folks here. I’m so very sorry.”

We all agreed to forgive and forget, as there seemed to be no real damage. The spilled wine had mostly remained on the bar. Nothing was broken, no one so much as bruised. Sophie poured and mixed the various drinks, and we all raised our glasses in thanks and forgiveness.

The stranger drained his glass in one long swallow, then awkwardly stood up once again. He reached a hand into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a wallet, from which he drew a hundred-dollar bill and laid it on the bar.

Sophie, still mopping up the spill, and keeping an eye on Alex to see if he was all right, said, “Let me get you some change.”

“Oh, no. Please, keep the change for your trouble. I sincerely apologize again to one and all.”

He made his way past me, seeming to stagger a bit and brushing against me where I stood leaning against the bar. Then he went out through the front door and onto the street.

“Son of a bitch,” I heard Sophie mutter, as she picked up the hundred-dollar bill and turned to the cash register. “It’s a phony.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“Feel the paper, it’s too smooth. Dammit!”

Fred dashed out the front door, hoping to catch the lanky stranger before he got away.

At the same moment the bell rang over the door to the lobby, and I realized Chardonnay had left that way.

Alex shouted, “I think she stole my wallet! I always keep it in the inside pocket of my sport coat. She must have slipped it out when she fell in my lap.”

“Mine is gone, too!” I said, feeling my hip pocket and realizing that the tall stranger must have lifted it when he’d grazed me on his way out.

“What a team,” Sophie said, visibly angry. “Two wallets and a couple of free drinks, and all it took was a little misdirection and some spilled wine. How much money did you guys have on you?”

“About a hundred bucks,” I said.

“I had about fifty in cash,” Alex said. “And a bank check for fifteen grand from a client this morning.” He seemed almost on the verge of tears at the thought of having lost so much of a client’s money.

“Do you think she could have known you had that on you?” asked Sophie.

“I don’t see how, unless she followed the guy from the bank.”

“That could be. Was it from the bank across the street?” I asked.

“It was,” he replied, with a sardonic snicker.

Fred returned to say there was no sign of either of the thieves.

We never learned for sure how they knew—or if they knew—about that bank check. Maybe they just got lucky. We never saw or heard from either of them again. Just a pair of traveling con artists, who happened to pass through town. They took some cash and left behind a story.

But the thing I really want to tell you about is what happened next.

If you’ve read my other stories about Sophie and the bar, you might know that she had a touch of what her grandmother’s people called the Sight. Her grandmother, Vadoma, had worked as a fortune teller in a travelling show; and Sophie had inherited some of that gift, though not to the same extent. Sophie herself never described it that way, she just said maybe she was more aware of people’s feelings than other people were. And maybe that’s true. For my part, it always seemed like she had a deeper understanding of the mysterious parts of life, the hidden powers that move us. We don’t see the wind, but we see the results of its blowing: the swaying of the trees or the tumbling of discarded papers. In the same way, most of us don’t see the forces that move us, drive us, operate within us and around us. But somehow Sophie could see those things, or sense them. Somehow, she could see the wind.

Once we got over the initial shock of being victimized by a pair of pick-pockets and returned to our drinks, Sophie leaned across the bar and said to me in a low voice: “Kenny, you better check on Alex. Something’s wrong.”

I leaned back in my stool to see him at the other end of the bar, eyes on his book. “He looks ok to me.”

“No. Something’s not right. Come down there with me.”

We both made our way down to Alex’s end of the bar. I laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Hey, buddy. Are you ok?”

Slowly, without moving his head, he tried to pull his eyes away from his book to look at me. Now I could tell Sophie was right. His eyes refused to focus, and tears were forming. He didn’t speak.

“Want me to help you upstairs?” I asked. “Maybe you need to lie down for a bit?”

Still no words. The tears now trickled out of Alex’s eyes and down his cheeks.

“Kenny, bring him into the back room,” Sophie said. “I’ll call 911.”

This was not a suggestion, so I followed orders. Behind the bar, between the unopened cases of beer and wine, there was a cot where the staff sometimes took naps between shifts. I managed to get Alex laid out on it. He still wasn’t speaking, and he neither cooperated nor struggled. It was as if his paralysis had spread through his entire body.

The fire station was on the same block. All the firefighters loved Murphy’s and Sophie, and they all knew Alex. The EMTs were there almost instantly. They did their thing, and I got shoved into a corner between an ancient freezer and the wall. I couldn’t see what was going on. I could only hear them as they tended to Alex. They had him on a stretcher and out the door faster than an Indianapolis 500 pit crew on Memorial Day weekend.

At the hospital, it was determined that Alex had had a stroke, caused by an embolism in his brain, and probably brought on by the stress of the pickpocket incident. The doctors said that if we hadn’t noticed there was something wrong, or if we’d just put him to bed and not called 911, the embolism almost certainly would have burst within a few hours, and he’d have died. Sophie saved Alex’s life that day. Her gift, her Sight, somehow allowing her to sense what the rest of us hadn’t noticed.

Alex had to spend some time in rehab, but he eventually recovered enough to come home and go back to work, not significantly worse off than he’d been before the stroke. The doctor’s advice to cut back on red meat didn’t mean any fewer trips to Murphy’s, though. It just meant Sophie made sure Alex had a salad for lunch every day—and then maybe a burger, if he still felt hungry.

The only other change that came about because of that day was Sophie framing the phony hundred-dollar bill and hanging it over the register behind the bar. Not to remember getting swindled, but to remember the day a pair of pick-pockets helped her save Alex’s life.