Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  He lay on his back, his limbs as still as certain white bubbles on the black water; and now he allowed himself to remember his last meeting with Victoria.

  50

  Will you stay up all night talking with me? she had said. I feel so lonely.

  I’ll try, if my stomach doesn’t bother me too much.

  Don’t bother if you don’t want to; I don’t care.

  I hope you do.

  Well, I like the feeling that there’s someone here right next to me. That’s what I always wanted. It didn’t matter who it was. Don’t get hurt; I’d rather have you with me right now than almost anyone—

  Who would you prefer? Your children?

  No, not them. They’d feel too sad here.

  Victoria, what would it be like if I came down to you?

  I’d hate it; I couldn’t stretch out. That’s how I always used to feel in college when some man spent too many nights in my bed.

  Well, when I die—

  I’d hate it, I said!

  Then what did you get married for?

  Oh, I wanted children. And he was right for me—very soulful, more intelligent than you, generous, a little detached—although he later did become jealous, especially when I took up writing you at the end.

  He loved you?

  They all did, or thought they did.

  You must have been good in bed.

  I wasn’t totally sure about men at first. But after I realized I could fake anything, I did as I pleased. If they’d only known! But they gave me what I wanted and it was pretty easy to give them what they wanted, so I used them and never felt used.

  Congratulations.

  You never got to find out, but anyhow I was very good at it.

  I’m glad, he said wearily. I did find out a little, since you and I—

  Were you good at it?

  Yes. Yes, I think so. I’ve gotten compliments—

  Compliments don’t mean anything, Victoria informed him with a smile. They’re just something that women do.

  Well, maybe some were more sincere than you.

  Please, please don’t get irritated! We’re only chatting—

  Were you ever my girlfriend?

  Certainly not, the dead woman giggled.

  I thought you were . . .

  Listen. I keep telling you: Our physical encounters were very limited. I placed very little emphasis on them, but I came to see that you felt differently. You took them in their proper light, not as a game the way I did.

  But since I took them in their proper light, then maybe—

  I’ve never cared to feel obligated.

  When you talk like that, I can’t decide whether I’m alone with you or just alone.

  When we were seventeen, I used to think you never got irritated.

  Victoria, how old are you?

  Seventeen.

  51

  I’m your past, she said after awhile, but you’re almost nothing to me. Why am I saying this? What makes me so cruel? I don’t understand myself anymore.

  You didn’t hurt me; I wish I could help you.

  I believe in following my heart, even if it’s dead and rotten. Even when I don’t understand myself—

  What do you mean?

  I don’t know. I see your tumor shining.

  What color is it now?

  Green. It’s hurting you; you’d better go.

  Will you allow me to visit you again?

  Thank you for being a gentleman, said Victoria. Yes. I allow you.

  Why can’t I make you feel better?

  Nothing can change me! laughed the lovely seventeen-year-old girl, her tears shining silver in the moonlight.

  I don’t believe that.

  Do you want me to claim you?

  Then what?

  You just lost your chance. When you were seventeen you would have given yourself to me without any questions.

  Victoria, you’re such a tease! Do you want me to claim you? I offered to dig you up and keep you in a flowerpot. Didn’t that happen to somebody’s head in the Decameron? But he was murdered. Well, so were you—by cancer . . .

  I want you to lie down with me.

  52

  She reached toward him, and he saw moonlight in her eyesockets. He knew that he truly was almost nothing to her, just as had been the case when they were seventeen. All she had ever desired, perhaps, was a partner with whom she could play again at the game of life. So he hesitated. When he began to turn away from her, he felt cold between his shoulderblades, as if something evil might reach for him. But what could harm him now? Moreover, why should her aspirations be judged unworthy merely because he signified little to her? And who had she ever been to him? The girl to whom he had written those morbid poems had certainly not been Victoria, but his own figment. He rose up from her grave. She said nothing, but a cold foul gust blew up around him from behind, stinging and numbing his lips. Now the back of his neck began to tingle as if spiders scurried on it. Perhaps she was angry. What did anything matter? All his memories—of her, Luke, his life and even the moon—resembled midges streaming up out of the sweating grass: at intervals the cloud of them took on certain provisional shapes which might have meant something, whereas the solitary insect which he squashed against his cheek had been so arbitrarily itself that his interpretative apparatus could not distort it into anything. Admitting that his life had been as meaninglessly active as bright green sedges writhing in the river wind impelled him into a consoling valuation of meaninglessness. The women who had passed over him like cool river waves over greenish sand, and certainly Victoria herself, what had they signified—for what did anything, when no life could be seen whole and coherently except by something which outlived it? This thought, self-serving as it might have been, he swallowed like one of his pain pills. Returning to her, he knelt down again, expecting to surrender himself to the mercy of some unclean thing, but there was nobody.

  Victoria, Victoria! he whispered.

  Slowly then she oozed back out of her grave, her face sparkling with silvery tears. He bent down low to kiss her, and as he approached her face he grew overwhelmed again, as he had at seventeen, by its loveliness, with the long blonde hair flowing over the blurred skull in semblance of a waterfall photographed in a lengthy exposure so that the impression of droplets and foam was retained in a statistical sort of form although there was only white haze; she smiled at him, and her bone-claws reached up through the dirt to rest lightly upon the back of his head as she drew him down to her, her wormy mouth widening until he drowned in her face.

  53

  Close upon dawn, exhausted, joyful, sad and nauseous, he seated himself on Mrs. Emilia Woodruff’s headstone and said: Did you like it?

  I found it very satisfying, thank you. But listening to the moon eats me up. Can you hear it?

  No.

  I shouldn’t scorn you for that, but I can’t help it. Does that hurt your feelings?

  On the other side of Victoria’s grave, the ghoul lay on its belly with its arms and legs splayed like a lizard’s, and it watched him grinning and breathless. He felt something between pity and affection for the thing; doubtless they would soon become better acquainted. Perhaps it knew where treasure lay (another broken pot with tarnished ovoid coins).

  Remembering Victoria’s question, he replied: Not anymore.

  Then I won’t tell you what the moon says.

  The ghoul fawned on him, grinning ever more widely until its rotting lips began to split. It smelled even worse than she. He said: Victoria, I’m not feeling good—

  Well, you don’t have much longer. I’m grateful that you choose to spend so many nights with me.

  And after I—

  Will you please stay until sunrise?

  If you want me to. Do you see that thing over there?

 
; Don’t speak of it.

  Maybe you don’t care . . .

  No, I enjoy these conversations, she whispered. But I feel at a loss.

  Why?

  What you said to me last time, I cherished that, I really did. But I don’t know you!

  What did I say?

  Actually, right now I’m so bored and tired; I wish I could retreat farther down, deep down under the clay. I could . . .

  You could what, Victoria? Victoria, is there something you’d like me to do?

  Don’t come anymore. Now that we’ve—

  All right.

  Why did you agree so easily? I wanted you to say—

  I won’t say it. As you reminded me, I don’t have much time left. If you want me to go, I—

  I’m sorry; I get cruel when I’m bored.

  Then shall I go?

  She did not answer.

  Smiling wearily at her, as if he were the dead one and she a child exciting herself with grief and anger over an imaginary injury to her favorite doll, he asked: Victoria, why are you that way?

  What do you expect? I’m thirty-six going on seventeen.

  He began to shiver; he was only feverish. Dawn came.

  I don’t need anyone very much, she remarked. It’s a cold feeling, a feeling where I know I should be crying and I can’t.

  Victoria, he said, I wish, I wish . . .

  Well, goodbye, she said.

  Bitterly he rose and turned his back on her. The sun was in his eyes.

  54

  In his last year, just before he declined to undergo surgery again, Luke had said: Sometimes I want something just because I used to want it. And if I think that through, then I don’t have to want it anymore.

  He had doubly cheated his witch lover, firstly by not using the green liquid to call her back, and secondly by saving a few drops of it, just in case. Now that he had no use for it, he poured it idly and thoughtlessly upon the earth-eater’s grave. This is what he heard:

  I can’t forget Mama and Papa going away. Dear Jesus, help me forget! Papa had his new top hat on.

  They prayed over me and he stood up, and he was leaning on his cane as if he’d turned much older; I was always his favorite. Every time he sobbed in his throat, I thought my heart was beating. What was that hymn they sang? It used to be my favorite. Carry on the Calvary, but I disremember the rest. He was holding Cornelia’s hand; she was learning how to walk again, after her polio. And Mama had to keep telling Susie not to tease her. I don’t know why she didn’t just . . . Mama looked just like a black waterfall in her veil. And she turned her face away from me. Then they went walking together down that gravel path; I was hoping that Papa would look back at me, but he never did. He was too sad. The path’s gone and so are the trees.

  Not a word came from Victoria’s grave. That was how it usually was when someone abandoned a lover. She had withdrawn from him absolutely. As for him, he was leaving her alone to be dead forever. When he died he would not see her. His stomach hurt. At the gate of the cemetery he wished to fall to his knees like a seventeen-year-old boy, but thought better of it—for now he felt angry with her for leaving him alone with the burden of life. Then he went home and unlocked his desk beneath the setting moon. All was silent. He took her letters in hand. They were very much out of order. The last one said: So that’s the bad news, but I won’t die. I’m getting aggressive chemotherapy. I’ll lose my hair. I just cut it really short. I’m still blonde. Something will grow back. I’ll live because I want to live. I’m doing everything I can to live.

  THE ANSWER

  I asked the grave why I must die, and it did not answer.

  I asked who or what death was, and it kept silent.

  I asked where the dead I loved had gone, and its earthern lips did not open.

  I begged for just one reply, to anything, and then its grassy lips began to smile. Moistening itself with its many-wormed tongue, it opened. Too late I realized the answer.

  GOODBYE

  With a heart full of hope, I look forward to the time when Jehovah God will deliver us from this painful system of things and lead us into an earthly paradise.

  The Watchtower magazine, 2012

  Every man, asserts a German psychotherapist, passes through a critical age in which he bids farewell to youth and love. This age begins at death. But I, arrested in my thanatosexual development, unceasingly relive my life, to which I do not care to bid farewell, not yet. I am a young ghost. Throughout this critical age (the deceased psychotherapist resumes), unsatisfied desires haunt us. What haunts me is my longing to breathe.

  Because death is eternal, people suppose that it must partake of the infinite, in which case we could hope to enter ever wider if darker voids. In fact, each threshold is meaner than the last.

  Throughout my life, but especially toward the end, when my heartbeats grew as slow as the drumbeats which announce a shrine dance, what I liked best of all was to sit behind the crowd of spectators, with my back against a tree as I inhaled the shade. If you have ever drunk in the humid sunshine of Kamakura in early spring, which is flavored, as is a fresh bun by its raisins, by pigtailed girls in white blouses and vermilion kimonos, you will understand me when I say that moments and instants can remain as distinct as the studs on a verdigrised bronze bell even in that languid ocean haze, when life and death resemble the square white sleeves of two shrine dancers slowly intersecting. Soon they would summon me to the dance, striking the gong which is shaped like a crocodile’s mouth. Then, perhaps, I might no longer be able to enjoy the flutter of a young woman’s eyelids, but I deluded myself that what I lost in colors and forms would be recompensed me in spacious ease, as if I would find myself lolling atop Kamakura’s famous cliffs, which are grown with ferns and bamboo. Once upon a time before I died I sat beside a woman I loved, on a shady cliff-ledge marked with many stupas, gazing into the lapis lazuli fog of the sea. She took my hand, and we gazed down upon the waving tops of bamboo, which were russet green, and beyond them our vision flew over the steep low house-tops somewhere between pastel and metallic in their various shades, then lost itself in the pale bay. We slept in the darkness of her hair, and woke among Kamakura’s blue hydrangeas, drinking up that summer, each humid green cliff-hill of which was so thick with growth as to resemble a single tree. Sometimes when she rolled her sticky body off of mine in order to drink green tea or make water, I even opened my eyes, faithfully hoping that somewhere within death I might pass into that blue-ceilinged room where seaside Kamakura pants with so many sharp green tongues. I have always wondered whether trees are speaking to me; and whenever they shaded me from the humid heat of Kamakura, nodding over me and glistening in ever so many coruscating greens like the foam from fresh-made powdered tea, I wished to thank them. Well, they shade me now. The huge-toed nakai trees bore into my bones. Whether she still lives I cannot say. Wherever she is, we cannot comfort each other.

  I progress but slowly in learning how to be breathless underground, my mouth choked with earth, worms and rain-seepage passing through me, my rotting coffin collapsing on me, breaking my ribcage, showering me with earth.

  It might be better could I forget our days in Kamakura, which were almost poisonously somnolent. After drinking in her love, each morning I was as a gasping, wilting leaf; a bamboo sapling exhausted by its own weight. Kites called above the treetops. Stroking my face, she wept for pleasure, and when I looked into her soul then I saw the yellow-green veins in a glossy blue-green leaf whose pigment is speckling off, leaving the yellow behind. Whether or not she loved me, she certainly lived me, and I her, I who can live no more. With her I anticipated life and death in Kamakura, both of them in the style of a japonica’s roots tied down with moss so sweetly. We roamed the jungled cliffs whose names we did not learn. We lay kissing and gasping in the wet sunlight, hopeful of the time when the sea should darken and the breeze should dance in the cool evenin
g waves.