Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  She’s looking for me, but I’m still hiding. We’re both losing strength—

  I can’t understand the rules here.

  You’re making progress—

  It’s not very pleasant, is it?

  I’m not brilliant, but I have so many friends even here. In the 1950s I could have been called the typical golden girl. Jane’s temper, Mary’s psychological problems, Cornelia’s issues with her mother, they get to be too much sometimes, but they’re all so self-centered that they don’t listen to each other, and so I’d feel useless if I didn’t listen. And there’s someone else here who needs me. It embarrasses me to say so; he’s passionate, and the things he says—

  Who is it?

  Your friend Isaac.

  He smiled at that; he would have laughed but then his stomach would have hurt.

  Does that offend you? she demanded. He said things to me that I wish you would have . . .

  Which things? he asked, wearily pitying her.

  If I told you, it wouldn’t be the same.

  Things I should have said when?

  When you were seventeen, of course. You don’t count now.

  But I didn’t count then, either.

  Your interpretation disturbed me at the time.

  My interpretation of what? I—

  Listen: I had sex with you not for some quest or even curiosity but because I enjoyed it, I really did! It was just the right place and the right time. I didn’t expect to find anything in what I did with you. I would have done it again if the opportunity arose. Actually I wouldn’t have, you know—not with you. You were too . . . But I certainly did it with others.

  I know, Victoria. And do you remember them all?

  Actually I didn’t sleep with as many people as you, so . . .

  For an instant he could have been her age and coming closer, trembling with excitement, kissing her hard round breasts. Then he said: Victoria, I forget some things. It was awhile ago—

  Of course you remember. Don’t you love me? Aren’t we seventeen?

  Sure.

  I’ll skip over the first part. From there on, your analysis is fairly correct. It’s a sad way to see me, though. I don’t see myself that way. I see myself as one shallow but interesting person in a slump, rotting away until she gets up enough nerve or disgust to rouse herself.

  And go where?

  Smiling slowly at him, knowing that he would be captivated, she replied: To the moon, of course!

  You’re teasing me.

  Maybe I am.

  She parted her lips, and her pallid arms went up around his head like wind-whipped branches. When he sought to kiss her, he seemed to taste the cool breath of the ground.

  47

  So that was his last summer, summer vines growing as eagerly down into the sunlight as a certain seventeen-year-old poet had once imagined himself digging up his dead Victoria, while the lives of people he no longer knew streamed away through the evening, and his tumor blossomed with its own claim to life; he lacked the right to cut it short, lacking, indeed, much to live for, because Victoria had loved him only superficially and Luke was dead. Now he was entirely alone, in a world of water over muck and half-closed flowers, half-closed flowers of sorrow. Turning away from the evening sun to seek something for which he had no definition, some gleam in the blackish-green water between reeds, he cried out to himself: What did Luke teach me? Maybe he can save me. He . . .

  But he used to tell Luke: You’re my best friend.— And Luke did not answer.

  That mattered, but not sufficiently to ruin anything. Once he accustomed himself to the fact that Luke was his best friend but he was not, or not necessarily, Luke’s, he found the situation much easier than he had adoring the flittery Victoria when he was seventeen. For after all, Luke had steadily, loyally loved him. When his girlfriend Beatrice left him, Luke phoned every day, his love reaching like sunflowers. And perhaps Luke had known how to live, more than he had, or differently, or something.— Was Luke happy?— Not especially. So perhaps my life was not a failure, either. But what if it was? What would Luke say?

  Luke was brave; he went away.

  Isn’t Victoria brave, then? Or can’t she go away?

  Returning to Mr. Murmuracki, he said: I’d like to visit Luke, if that’s possible.

  Of course. He’s in the viewing room.

  He asked himself: How could Luke have left me, when he was my best friend? But I wasn’t his, or at least he would never say so, and therefore I . . .— Tears rushed down his cheeks, because when Luke was still alive he had not told him enough how much he loved him. More than Victoria, and . . . The touch of his fingers against each other astonished him; he wasn’t yet dead! What should he be doing with the time? . . . Luke’s greatest failure as a friend was that he had nearly always said no. And his greatest failure to Luke was . . . Well, who was he, but a wispy ghost like Victoria, good for nothing but mist?

  Do you remember the way, sir?

  I think so.

  Then go the other way. It’ll be your second left. By the way, Luke was a good man like your father. Take your time. I’ll be in my office.

  The door opened by itself. The viewing room was darker than any moon crater. How he loved the sweet loneliness of the moon! As soon as he had seated himself, the velvet curtain rose. Through the ground glass he saw a rock-maze on a steel-blue plain of moonsand—which of course was not to say that the cemetery’s configuration could be overlaid upon some moon landscape. Now he seemed to be floating down a soft grey slope which shone with white boulders; he must be passing across the terminator. The moon was as rich as Victoria’s shoulders when she was seventeen and eighteen and thirty-six and a rotting ghost. The moon was lovely-black like the shadow side of a boulder.

  He saw snow along the razor-ridges of a desert range, all grey and ocher-grey down the canyon-outlined mountain-triangles in that midday glare, and then along the sandy basin rose a narrow snout of red earth-monster, still for so long that it might not have been alive, concealing everything above its neck in a sprawl of honeycolored sandstone mounds. Luke and Raymond had gone that way, over the monster’s neck; and Raymond returned alone.

  While he awaited them he felt that he could see time whole, as a rock with marvelous cracks. Every cleavage became a pattern or rune. It seemed to him that because the present travelled continually with him, it never ended, perhaps not even at death. This moment was ineradicable; therefore, so was he. It appeared that his present could never extinguish. Whether or not that was so, it scarcely mattered to him, although he did not know why it did not.

  If anyone clambered up the moon-beast’s snout, it disguised itself by means of simple immensity, so that its scaly wrinkles become ravines, its deep folds canyons, its bristly pores chalky-green squiggles of saltbush. The lid of its cunningly shut eye was nothing but sand. One tramped like a fly across its rocky brow.

  Upon a rock, another fly, a black one, busily drummed with all six legs, then gripped with two and kicked with two, like an apprentice swimmer holding onto the side of the pool, and finally rushed loudly away.

  By late afternoon, the long chocolate-red beast was purplish-black: nearly as dark as the crow which flew over, and the lake-line was now dull and inconspicuous; the western mountains were reddish-purple, their crests, snow and triangles alike all going shades of blue; and suddenly time began again.

  Then it came twilight, the time of desert colors. Raymond, as calm as if he were in his apron, with his magnifying goggles pulled down into place as he bent over the grinding wheel (every woodenheaded gouge in its place, flat edge up, the many pliers claws-up against the window), arrived and said: He stepped off the path.

  Well, he wanted to go.

  Raymond nodded. He was half retired, slowing down; soon he too would die.

  They told Stephanie that Luke fell.

  No
w the moon-beast was below him, the lunar surface sweeping eternally toward and behind him, and the complete blackness of a white-rimmed crater passed beneath him, while far off to his left he saw a spaceship like a golden firefly hovering on its tail not very high above the violet-grey plain. Here came another crater; he remembered the smooth dark dimple in the moon of Victoria’s belly when she was seventeen. Thus all the moon lands, cold and white.

  His father once bought him a set of compact binoculars, laughing with delight at the clarity of the lenses. The middle-aged son, who had never been able to see well or far, dully thanked him for the gift. He was grateful, but feared that his father had wasted money, for how could the son’s useless eyes ever be worthy? He nearly felt as if he had cheated his father. From time to time, and more so after his father’s death, he packed them along on his journeys, but frequently forgot to look through them. When he did remember to raise them to his tired eyes, he was not always certain what to zoom in on. It was always good to focus on a deer or a bear, of course; and at times they were capable of inciting in him the same pleasure he felt in handling a certain knurled chisel of Raymond’s. When he left them at home, he felt regretful, even guilty; how could he be so inconsiderate of his father?

  (The reason that he had declined to use the witch’s green potion to bring back his father was this: He might bore his father. Surely his father was better off without him.)

  There came a time when he returned the binoculars to one of the pigeonholes of his father’s desk, and left them there. Perhaps he was already getting sick by then. One night he dreamed that he took up the binoculars again and looked through them, only to discover that they were two grave-wells, except that one lens showed nothing but dirt and darkness while the other revealed, far down the black shaft, a silver sprinkling of stars.

  If there could be a place where one desired nothing, by virtue either of eternally shining joy or of nothingness itself, then it must be (so he supposed) a place where one would no longer learn anything, and therefore evidently a place choked with dirt and darkness if not with distracting light; anything without an end to it sounded nauseating. In which of the two wells would it lie? And where would Victoria be? Although she never seemed to blame him for calling her up, and nearly every night told him some new tale of the quotidian, prairie dog life of the cemetery’s inhabitants, what if this spiderweb of other consciousnesses in which she seemed to exist were no more than the plausibly burrowing roots of one of those half-minute dreams which as we awake quickly grow down back into the past, so that for awhile we imagine that we dreamed for many hours? And why would she never tell him whether she had come from the dirt or the dark sky?

  Now here in Mr. Murmuracki’s viewing room he seemed to see farther and better than he ever had—perhaps nearly as well as Luke once did. But Luke did not come.

  All the same, he knew that Luke had loved him and was loyal.

  He remembered Luke saying: What I want is to be free. I don’t want freedom from anything. I want freedom for everything.

  At that time Luke was sitting in the kitchen, with a tear running down his face, because he was dying, and perhaps because he and Stephanie were not getting along.

  48

  When my neighbor awoke, he looked once more within the envelope which said amusing enclosures and Inside are pictures!!!!!, and there behind the picture of her at the zoo was a new photograph of her which he had never before seen; she was nude and smiling at him, and she was a beautiful old woman. Her wrinkled white breasts hung down uncut by any surgeon, and her blonde hair had gone greyer than his. She stood stretching her hands to him. Her body was the white trunk of a flowering tree, growing out over its reflection in the brown-green water stained by the rainbow of mud-spirits beneath.

  49

  It was so humid in the light that he could barely breathe. As soon as he strode into the shade, he realized without comprehending it that the evening went on forever.

  However that might have been, no summer goes on forever; and only a very few more nights swam by, like water-birds uplifting their lovely heads, until two culminations arose—one in regard to Victoria, of course, and the other having reference to his sickness. He passed some days in bed, terrified of being alone with his death; he would rather have been attacked by the ghoul-thing than lie in his bed; but he would rather have died alone than to return to the corporation which called itself his hospital; very early one morning the disease momentarily opened its claws, permitting him to dress and drive out behind the cemetery. First the fear lifted, then the sadness; no matter that neither would keep away from him long. Two blocks past the stoplight he pulled over, got out and leaned across the hood, vomiting easily and almost pleasantly, freeing himself. Then he returned to the driver’s seat, feeling not much weaker, and drove on, ignoring the cramp in his chest. There was a silver sheet of mist on the brown fields. Victoria must be sleeping by now. The upper edge of the mist kept rising up like spray, the mist itself creeping ever thicker and whiter beneath the orange sun, and now he passed Mr. Murmuracki’s establishment, following the stripe of white mist beneath the grey trees, the rising widening silver mane of mist. When he reached the edge of the swamp and parked, the lower half of the sun’s vermilion disk was darkened but not concealed by the mist. The air stung his nostrils. The reeds were silvered with dew, and a spiderweb cut with painful distinctness through the dawn fog. He strolled down into the murky dark, spiderwebs fingering his face, but already it was not dark anymore, the sun a ball of spiderwebs in the mist, the sparkling sunglow low through the dark trees. Here lay the long straight shadow of an oak tree across its own fallen leaves, which now glowed ever more red and coppery, as if they were metals heated from underground. The curlicues of oak leaves’ edges grew more definitive as the light increased, and he thought about Victoria, not that his thoughts converged on any conclusion—rather the opposite; for just as when the sun makes ray-shadows in widening diagonals down through the mist, bluish-dark and whitish-grey, thus his so-called thoughts spread out across the world, doubtless accomplishing deeds of inestimable value. All the summer’s cattail-down had now given way to spiderwebs. He began to feel unwell again. The line of shadow remained more than halfway up the reed-wall, but the sun was rising rapidly, so that tiny white droplets on the reeds suddenly came to life, as the sweat on Victoria’s face once did when he was kissing her passionately; and the many little fingers of certain oak leaves were already bleeding; soon those leaves would fall. A thick plinth of gold-lit grass rose up around the base of an oak from a plain of flattened grass which was still silvered by shadow and dew, and on that tree was a single gall, rosy in the light. The day looked to be as lovely as the slough’s scum, which was turquoise-green yet peculiarly reminded him of Victoria’s moist young skin, because the way it bore those flame-tongues of brighter yellow-green light where the morning sun reached it created an impression of resilient firmness. Around him rose the water-metal songs of birds. He pressed on as if he were going somewhere, emerging into the wet warm golden grass which was horizoned by the shadow of the railroad embankment, two spiderweb-suns glowing in midair, pallid insects and thistle-motes flitting across them like microplanetoids, the geese calling overhead, the sun comforting his tired neck.

  Now he could never get enough of gazing down into the dark water, with its greenbladed stalks paling as they went deeper. He peered and studied as earnestly as if one could truly understand the difference between water and air, which one needed to comprehend in order to determine where the downgrowing reflections of reeds might truly be, if they were anywhere. He thought to spend hours, perhaps the rest of his life, watching these water-pictures, which lived more active lives than their tangible upward-growing shadows, for as the water trembled, or a fish-moon arose in their mist, they altered as their doubles could not.

  Perhaps it was in this place beneath the flocks of crying geese that he should have sought Victoria all along, rather than in her gra
ve; for wasn’t it merely the rotting part of her in the latter place, and isn’t a ghost necessarily unclean by being chained to its carrion? A ghost, perhaps, might claim otherwise; but in any event, here amidst the paling reeds seemed as close as he could ever get to the lost bright part of her, which if it had been anything like his (not that he knew) must have died long before the rest.

  He felt very ill now. When he breathed, the stinging air seemed to ripple around his nostrils, as if he were lying on the bottom of one of those sloughs where the sky puddled across the ground like mercury, and dark water were streaming across his face as he gazed upward, never to know who or what might be lying in any of those blackly bright pools around him.— He said to himself: I need to take stock here, and . . .

  Unlike most of his other friends, Luke had always been able to understand the benefit of doing inventory; and when he told Luke that he had discovered this or that thing or act which he could sell, Luke approved, understanding the meaning of labor. If Luke were here now, and preferably still possessed of his superb vision, which had deserted him in his early fifties, then some of this might get categorized and even saved—for instance, these young cattails lying down together, their necks broken, their heads heavy with dew. Luke would have known what to do. In this Raymond had resembled him, for what could be more organized than the many shelves around Raymond’s shop, and all his many cabinets, some with pull-out metal basins to catch shavings, wax dust and loose diamonds, and Raymond’s various lamps, his footrest drill, the chisels all in place? Once he had been alone at Raymond’s, the grinding wheel slowing down from a whir into a wheeze, and there had been silence, and before that, when he was seventeen, he was kissing Victoria, kissing her so greedily and gratefully; don’t let the grinding wheel slow down. So what would Luke have said? He would have pretended to say something else, disguising his advice as valueless. Shivering, either with fever or with emotion, he thought about his best friend’s death, and then Victoria’s, although it was not as if he thought, much less had “learned,” anything in particular about them, the dark little swallows rising on either side of him, the breeze refreshing yet somehow also hurting him, chilling his fevered face, his chest aching, a single monarch butterfly hanging on the tip of a reed, opening and closing its wings, jittering its antenna while the reed swayed in the breeze; and slowly, finally the insect expanded its wings. He thought about Victoria, his thoughts of her like dark swallows speeding away, the day resolving into reed-fingered sky-pools as his fever increased, and he glided over the grass. A fish snapped in the water. He sought to cool himself by touching a reed, whose chill stung his fingers and made him shiver without relieving him from burning. A half-torn formation of swallows swayed and twisted in the air until he grew nauseous. Wandering away from them, he forgot his own existence until the muck-perfume which he had been smelling since daybreak inexplicably called attention to itself, and he found the sun now high in a dark oak like a pure white gall. A dewdrop on a leaf twinkled whitely and vibrated. Sun-shards whitely cut the darknesses of various other leaves, while others were backlit entirely or in part, and many remained silhouetted. He could not understand any of this. Spills of sun-milk on the silver-red shadow-grass further baffled him. He vomited, although no blood came up. To pass here without even knowing why, in the tang of rot, the licorice of anise, as a meadowlark’s notes bubbled up through water which was in fact air, this was his reward for having once been seventeen. Luke was right. It was better off to die alone, passing in and out of the sun, and perhaps when it happened he would even be grateful. All of his experiences had become lovely reeds around him. Craving the shock of coldness from them, he took up another of Victoria’s long unread letters in his hands; he was standing over his father’s desk, struggling against another cramp in his belly; now he was lying on the bed, chewing up a handful of pills. Silver lichens and withered berries hung inside his eyelids. Victoria’s letter lay across his heart. After awhile the pills began to help him, and his sorrows sped away like morning swallows.