“I will,” Grace is firm. “I want to see my family too.”
“We’re not going to get anywhere,” Agnes says with a warning tone in her voice, “I can feel it.”
“Well, we’re going to try,” Grace insists and she stands up and brushes biscotti crumbs from her skirt. “We’re most certainly going to try.”
This time we don’t enter the maze. We walk the perimeter of the building, and we pass those eerie planes, those white sharks lined up on the licorice black, lined up and waiting for god knows what. We pass the counter where a group of people are still gathered and they are arguing and jostling, while harried flight attendants shout from behind the counter.
I want to check if it’s the same group of people or a new lot but we walk by too quickly. Besides, I hadn’t noticed much the first time.
I spot the womb that birthed my arrival, that steel and black leatherette chair, and I can still feel the burning pain as I surfaced. I look out the window. The immaculate green astro turf between the runways is unchanged, as are the cotton wool clouds that are two-dimensional and cartoon-like in their perfection. A movie backdrop, Grace had said. Sometimes, it’s as if I’ve stepped into a graphic novel that’s been assembled using clipart.
We walk for what feels like hours but of course, there’s no way of telling. Shirley the Driver passes us, beeping and squawking, her lights flashing like a Christmas tree and we all press up against the wall.
“We’re nearly there,” Agnes tells me and I nod.
We turn down an unusually dark hallway. “Everything’s on one level here,” I remark. “No escalators, elevators, stairs or ramps.” No one finds my observation worthy of comment and I fall silent.
“We’re here,” Grace says after we turn a corner and walk past a series of yellow doors with yellow half-moon handles. I want to ask what’s with the yellow all of a sudden, but I sense it’s not a good time for questions. I don’t want the others to bounce me. They haven’t said they can do that, but I’m certain they have the power.
We stop in front of a door, and no one wants to be the first to venture inside. But then something creepy happens—the door handle twists down and the door swings quietly open.
“I know you lot are out there,” a hoarse voice bellows, “so come on in, you ninnies. I know what you’re going to ask me and I can tell you now that the answer is still the same, it’s no, nada, zip, zero, and I’ve got no idea why you wasted your time coming out all this way. I guess you had nothing better to do or you wanted to introduce me to your new friend. Hear this, Julia, you’re a longer ways off from a Viewing than you can imagine. You, with your ego the size of Jupiter, well, you’ll have to wait in line like the rest of them. Your charms hold no currency here.”
I feel as if someone has thrown a bucket of ice water on me. I can’t move or speak. I just stand there, dripping with the venom of this woman’s sarcasm. “Come on in,” the voice bellows again. “Bloody rude to stand out there and make me shout.”
“Hardly a point in coming in, is there?” Fragile little Isabelle shouts back and I am surprised. The mouse has roared. But then again, this is a girl who had sex with a lot of strangers—she isn’t afraid of anything.
“You should at least give us a timeline,” Isabelle says loudly, and she marches inside and I can see that her fists are clenched and her face is white.
The others creep in behind her and I bring up the rear.
“Should? Fuck should,” Beatrice says and I guess she’s never had Cedar as her Helper.
Beatrice is sitting behind a desk, with her feet up. She’s wearing Birkenstocks and her toenails are as thick and gnarly as old tortoise shells. They are also inexplicably filthy. There is no dirt in Purgatory, so how did her feet get to be that dirty? Did she arrive like that, and never wash?
Beatrice is chomping on a large apple and bits of it are spraying everywhere. She chews loudly with her mouth open and I look away, studying her office instead. Her bookcase filled is with works by Dorothy Parker, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter S. Thompson, and Raymond Chandler, and I wonder if she had been a drunk back on Earth. That, and heavy smoking, would explain her less-than-dulcet tones.
A large poster of a Hawaiian sunset covers one wall along with a framed picture of an old Cadillac convertible. A stack of needlepoint cushions is piled in the corner and I wonder if Beatrice was in the Needlepoint Room when I barged in looking for Agnes. A large framed embroidered canvas has a green alligator baring its teeth, with the slogan, Come In, The Water’s Fine!
Everything is pristine and polished but the items are old and show wear: the Scrabble set, the stacked, empty margarine tubs, the cans of Sanka. A tiny black toy cat is perched inside a glass bell jar on the edge of Beatrice’s desk and behind Beatrice’s head is a framed picture of a vase and a bowl of fruit and the artwork, if you can call it that, is so dreadful that I am mesmerized. It looks like it was drawn with thick crayon and then melted over an open fire.
Beatrice stops chewing for a moment and the silence is so thick that I stop my inventory of the place and glance at the others to see what is going on, but they are fearfully looking at Beatrice who is calmly watching me.
“Enjoying yourself?” she asks. “Very nosy, aren’t you? Nosy parker.” Beatrice, resplendent in shiny black shorts and a red and black man’s checked shirt, cocks her head to one side and I can’t think of anything to say. She shrugs and returns enthusiastically to her apple and juice spurts out in an arc onto Grace’s blouse and Grace flinches.
“Well, when?” Fat Tracey can hold back no longer. “When can I see them?”
“Should have thought of that when you left them,” Beatrice counters. “It’s not up to me, anyway.”
“It is so,” Isabelle insists. “We all know that.”
“You don’t know fuck all,” Beatrice aims the apple core at a bin in the corner and slam dunks it. “You think you do, but you don’t. Who would you View, Isabelle? Huh? Tell me?”
“No one. It’s not for me. It’s for Fat Tracey and Grace and Agnes,” Isabelle says. “I never had anyone, I don’t care. I’m fine with things the way they are, but it’s not fair to the others.”
“Fair? Fair? Like life was ever fair?” Beatrice is mocking. She whips her feet off the desk and pulls her chair close to her desk. She gives her mouse a thwack, to wake up the computer. She peers at the screen and then she fumbles for a pair of reading glasses, searching on her desk until she realizes they are strung around her neck on a beaded cord.
She puts them on and examines the screen, using the rough, thick nail of her forefinger to scroll down. She mutters all the while, and we stand there, silent and unmoving. She taps furiously at the keyboard, so hard I am surprised it isn’t damaged, and then she slams a fist on the Enter key. The printer next to the desk springs into life and jerkily delivers a single page.
We hold our breath.
“Here,” she says handing the sheet to Agnes. “Access for you for the Viewing Room. You’ve got half an hour tomorrow.”
Agnes looks stunned. “But I’m not ready,” she says.
“I am!” Fat Tracey and Grace both chorus at the same time.
“You’re ready when I say you are,” Beatrice retorts. She looks at Agnes and holds out her hand. “You want to give it back?”
“No.” Agnes clutches the paper to her chest.
“Thought so. Well then, goodbye all of you. Don’t come again, why don’t you?” She laughs and coughs up a wedge of phlegm that she spits into a Kleenex and lobs at the bin, narrowly missing my head.
“Go on, shoo! Out you go!”
We turn and file out slowly, and the yellow-handled door swings firmly shut behind us. We stand in the corridor for a while, in silence.
“I can’t do it today,” Agnes says. “I’m not ready.”
“Yeah, well, you hear
d her, it’s for tomorrow in any case,” Samia points out.
“When you do it, do you want us to come with you?” Grace asks and Agnes nods.
“Yes, I can’t do it alone. We’ll go after coffee.”
“Will you wait to have coffee with me?” I ask, sounding unfamiliarly unsure of myself. “I have to go and see Cedar, first thing.”
“Of course we’ll wait,” Samia says when no one else replies, and my confidence level drops even further. “I’ll come and find you,” Samia reassures me. “We’ll wait. Don’t worry.”
I thank her, and before I can say anything else or ask the others what they’re going to do next, I am back in the Makeup Room, alone.
11. DUCHESS
THE NEXT DAY, THERE I AM, back at Cedar’s door. Go on up, you baldhead! the sign says. Yeah, well, whatever.
“Come on in, Julia!” Cedar is his usual, cheery self.
I ease the door open and slip inside, carefully closing it behind me. I keep my mouth zipped. I am not going to screw up this time. I need to hear what Cedar has to say, I need to have my realization, and get the fuck out of here. I mean, get the heck out of here. Surely heck is okay? I sit down silently and look at him.
He is beaming at me. “And how are we today?”
I mumble something.
“Settling in? Great! So, Julia, what do you think brings you here?”
I look at him. “What do you mean?” I slur, fearful that an obscenity will fly out if I open my mouth any wider.
“To Purgatory. Why not Hell? Why not Heaven? Why to this place of in-between? You don’t strike me as an in-betweener.”
“I’m not,” I mumble. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Hmmm.” He is seated in a grey wingback chair, wearing his beige corduroy trousers and his expression is earnest. His close-set eyes peer at me, his hands are clasped and his feathers are aflutter. “You don’t remember anything before you achieved consciousness in Purgatory?”
I shake my head. “Where’s my husband?” I ask.
Cedar shakes his head. “I can’t tell you.”
“But you do know.”
He nods. “But it’s vital that you remember on your own. I can’t impede your progress.” He falls silent and leans back in his chair, his hands steepled in prayer.
“How about we do a little exercise?” he asks. “I’m going to encourage you to open your mind, close your eyes, and listen to my breathing guidance. Can you do that?”
I nod, still not trusting myself to say anything.
“Close your eyes, breathe in for the count of five. Hold for five and out for five. I’ll guide you.”
We do this for a while and I start to feel sleepy.
“What do you remember, Julia?” he asks softly. “Before you came here, what do you remember? Were you making a cup of tea? Were you on the telephone to your mother? Were you stroking your kitty cat?”
My eyes fly open. Cat? “I had a cat?”
“Concentrate, Julia. Let’s start again.”
I sigh. In for five, hold, out for five.
The image of a cat comes to my mind. I see a large, incredibly grumpy, beautifully ugly cat with a squashed face and a pug nose. An immensely hairy, immensely fat, immensely angry cat. I can’t keep my eyes shut. “Cat. Oh.”
I get up and pace around the room.
Cedar doesn’t say anything, he just watches me.
I fold my arms across my chest. “Yes,” I say. “A cat.”
Before I can stop myself, tears are pouring down my face.
“Lady Marmalade. But I called him Duchess. He was my baby. My joy. I got him from a pet store. I swore I’d never buy from them, such a rip-off, you know, and pet store animals are all demented or deformed in some way. Too much inbreeding or something or they keep them in cages too long. But I was in a mall and I walked past him and he meowed at me and I stopped and I couldn’t help myself. I got them to take him out of his cage and he climbed up my shirt, and I paid two thousand dollars for a kitten, right then and there.”
By now, my nose is running and Cedar gets up and hands me a box of Kleenex.
I grab a fistful, blow my nose and continue.
“But he was demented, of course he was. He peed everywhere. He’d go right in front of me, on the carpets. He’d saunter into the room, give me a filthy look, and pee. But what could I do? I loved him. So I cleaned up after him or, I tried to. He peed in places I couldn’t find until I discovered wiring and cables had been eaten away by his puddles. He could have started a fire or something.
“I took him to the vet, and we put him on drugs and they helped, we drugged the shit, oh sorry Cedar—” I look at him, my face wet with tears and I stand there, waiting to be bounced out the room but Cedar just nods and I carry on.
“And it helped, it lessened the problem. And he was my baby, my buddy, my friend, for nine and a half years, and then he got sick; his liver started to give out. I tried everything. I took him to homeopathy. I must have spent thousands of dollars on him, maybe even tens of thousands, I’m not exaggerating, but in the end, oh, in the end, nothing helped.”
I sink down next to Cedar, sobbing. I am shaking and howling in a way I’ve never cried before. “He died. I held him and he died. His heavy, grumpy, angry body just gave out. One minute he was purring, and the next, he left me. He got light as a feather and I didn’t know where his weight went, but I knew it was his anger and it was gone. And his anger was like my anger, and my anger is what grounds me. Without it, I too would be nothing and I’d float away, and I still miss him so much.”
I am wailing and Cedar is rubbing my back like I’m a baby and I don’t care. Snot runs down my face and I cry like my heart is broken. And just when I think I can’t cry any more, I start all over again, wailing that ungodly sound and Cedar sits there patiently, rubbing me.
Finally, I get to hiccupping. “I loved him so much,” I say. “There wasn’t a day I didn’t miss him. I had him cremated and I have an urn and I talk to him every day. I ask him why he left me. I know that sounds stupid but I do. I talk to him every day, so if you’re asking me if I was talking to my kitty cat before I came here, yes, I most likely was. He was the only friend I could rely on in this world.”
“But he left you,” Cedar points out.
“He did,” I wail. “Why? He wasn’t even ten years old. Didn’t he love me? Didn’t I make him happy? I tried so hard.”
I start to cry again.
“This is excellent progress,” Cedar says and he hands me the box of Kleenex. I blow my nose again. I am exhausted.
“We’ve done enough for the day. What you should do now,” Cedar says kindly, “is have a lie-down in the Rest Room. Would you like me to walk you there?”
I nod. “Yes, please.”
I get up and touch my swollen face. “I don’t want anybody to see me like this,” I say, and Cedar laughs.
“You are so concerned with all the wrong things. But don’t worry, we won’t bump into anyone. I can arrange that.”
I don’t ask him what he means. I let him lead me down the corridor, past several doors until he finally opens the door to the Rest Room. He guides me through the foyer and into an enclosed circled curtain and I lie down and he rubs my back.
I start crying again. And this time, I am not even sure what for.
12. VIEWING AUNTIE MIRIAM
A FEW HOURS LATER, I suppose it is the scheduled four, I find myself outside the Rest Room, my face still swollen and my eyes gritty and burning.
Cedar is nowhere to be seen and I suppose I must have slept or whatever the equivalent thereof is.
I suddenly remember that I was supposed to meet Samia, or she was going to find me, after my session with Cedar but Duchess had derailed everything.
I am utterly miserable and I have no idea what to do. I have missed
out on coffee, on Agnes’s Viewing, on everything.
I walk aimlessly down the hallway, thinking I might try to find the Ablution Block and have a shower, and then find something new to wear in the Clothes Room.
I still feel the loss of Duchess keenly, as if his death had happened that very morning, and I can’t find the Makeup Room, or the Ablution Block or the Canteen or the Coffee Room. I feel as bereft and as sad as I have ever been. I lean against the wall and close my eyes, thinking I’ll apologize to Agnes when I see her again, and I’ll explain.
“Hello!” It’s Samia. She pops up beside me, and stands there, grinning. Much to both our surprise, I grab her and hug her, and then I start crying again.
“I’m sorry,” I am wailing and splashing her with tears. “I got caught up with Cedar, and I couldn’t find you and—”
“Don’t worry,” she says and she reaches up and pats my arm. I am nearly twice her height and bending down to hug her is killing my back, so I straighten up and wish I had a Kleenex and I sniff loudly instead.
“We wouldn’t have gone without you,” Samia says. “I came to fetch you, the others are waiting. Come on, coffee first and then the Viewing. There’s time, we’ve got all the time in the world! Well, in four-hour segments anyway.”
Samia leads me to a door that I swear I opened, but all I found for my troubles was a couple playing Scrabble.
I greet the others in the coffee shop but I am distracted and while Samia makes me a latte, I try to figure out what’s on my mind. Scrabble. It has something to do with Scrabble.
I think back to the box I saw on Beatrice’s bookshelf. I was good at Scrabble back in the day and I wouldn’t mind finding a partner. A truly bizarre thought crosses my mind. I wonder if Beatrice would like to have a game or two. Ferocious though the old duck is, there is something about her meanness I can relate to.
Back on Earth, my rules were the only rules, and you played by them or you left. And usually, if you left, you left in tears. I was single-minded in my focus. Work was my life. My apartment was right next door to the office and my working hours were ten a.m. to nine p.m. with at least two weekends a month thrown in, and if that didn’t work for you, well then, so long and thanks for all the fish. I was upfront about the hours but most people thought I was kidding or exaggerating, but they soon found out it was no joke.
No Fury Like That Page 7
