Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  I watch her stuff the kimono and needles into a shopping bag.

  After she’s gone, Isifrid says, “You really ought to be nicer to her, Lucy. She won’t be around forever.” She sounds choked up, but that’s only because she’s yet to exhale smoke from the joint Stanley’s passing around. “And you,” she says, nodding at Stanley, “you’re not helping your fertility with all this grass. You should probably just give the rest to me.”

  “What about her?” he says, and points at me. “Doesn’t she get any? I think she probably needs it more than you.”

  “I’m right here, you know. I can hear what you’re saying.”

  But he just carries on. “Missed her oldest friend’s wedding, calls their place every night, the broken heart, I’d want to tune out of my life, too.”

  “Is this your idea of helping?” I say. “Let’s light a candle for my darkest hour in recent memory?”

  Mother sits up. “You missed Kam’s wedding?”

  Stanley and I look at her incredulously, though by now, her absence from the world should startle no one.

  “It was awful,” Stanley says.

  I nod. And Mother, she starts to laugh. She laughs for a solid two minutes. Without apology or effort to stymie this upswelling of glee that has me less offended than bored.

  “Oh, that’s sad,” she says, regaining her voice and sighing.

  “Yep,” I say. “So much for that. Lucy strikes again.”

  “Oh, come on,” Stanley says. “Don’t be so harsh. I think you’re doing all the right things. You are going to rehab, when is that again? Rehab definitely counts toward putting your life together. There will be other chances to show up.”

  “Whenever there’s space,” I say, and reach for my Gatorade. I don’t know that I’ve ever been short on electrolytes, but that doc spooked me for life. “Some spot in Florida. Popular I guess.”

  Mother snorts. “What gave you that idea? It’s in Texas. Get your boots on.”

  I am chewing on a straw, which drops right out of my mouth.

  “That’s right. Close to the border. Don’t look so horrified. It’s not Tikrit.”

  “Who found this place?”

  “Aggie.”

  “You let Agneth choose my rehab?”

  “Would you rather I did it?”

  “It’s not that hard,” Stanley says. “Make a few calls, ask some questions.”

  Mother shrugs. “No matter now.”

  Stanley pinches my thigh. “You’ll look cute in chaps. Take photos.”

  “I don’t feel well,” Mother says. She’s looking at Stanley. “Where’d you get this stuff?”

  “The park.”

  “Oh, great.”

  He looks confused. He doesn’t know about the delivery boys who’ll door-to-door an eighth and still charge you a hundred dollars. He doesn’t know kind from basil. I pat him on the knee and say Mother’s just upset about other things.

  Is it odd to talk rehab while smoking a joint? I imagine it says something about my level of commitment.

  “Texas?” I say. “The desert?”

  I look from Mother to Stanley, but neither seems inclined to respond. Perhaps Hannah will be more sympathetic. I excuse myself. I go to her room and walk in. I don’t bother to knock or password because I have no hope they will work.

  I find her on the floor with scrapbook open. She’s got a tower of completed books by the wall. I think she’s got every article about Dad that’s come out since the theft, plus any news item that even mentions his name.

  I see one from the Tribune & Georgian about how if the plague hits St. Mary’s, Georgia will mobilize. Also, in case of emergency, supplies will be doled out at the Heritage Bank. And just in case you forgot: the plague went missing from Dr. Michael Clark’s lab in December of last year, etc., etc.

  I ask if I can help. She says, “Suit yourself.”

  There’s a Ziploc of clippings that need a home. I overturn the bag and start sifting. I’d like to tell Hannah that saving such things will not help her turn the corner on grief. Or that articles demonizing our father will not help her remember him any better. But then maybe this is her process, and who am I to interfere. My instincts about how to care for other people are worthless.

  Do I have a process? I remember the morning I found his body, I’d eaten a blueberry muffin. I’d woken up, intending to secure a job of value so that at least someone in this family could feel good about himself. I’m pretty sure Dad was still in his robe when I waved goodbye. No kiss or anything, just a wave from the door to the kitchen because I’d grab a muffin on the way to every temp agency in the city where I’d cop to skills like medical billing and the Internet. Internet proficient is what I was calling it.

  Of course, I had to find the agencies, locate the power button on my laptop, and forge a resume, so by the time noon rolled around I was still at a café, pulping muffin crumbs with a spoon. But I was hopeful. The months before had been so lowly, I’d really thought we were coming out of it. Dad was up before nine. Mother was the most sober I’d seen her in years. And Hannah, she was doing some PI work, wanting to exonerate Dad, but also maybe to find him out, because in the long run, it was way better if he had the vials than if some nut had them. Or some nut likely to bioterrorize the country. There was much ransacking of his stuff, which he did not take well. A part of me worries this is what tipped him over, that his own family doubted him. But we didn’t doubt. It was just fear. Which is what I experienced when I found him suspended from the ceiling fan. I can still picture the verdigris furrowed into his neck—rope burn, I think—and one foot that had lost a slipper, fallen to the tile. Also, the police removing his body in a tarpaulin sack. Just what sort of process gets you over that? I really think the articles are a bad idea.

  I ask Hannah if she’s certain she wants to be doing this. “Look,” I say, and hold up a piece from the Los Angeles Times, “this one makes like Dad had bad blood with the higher-ups.”

  “Totally untrue,” she says, and glues it down.

  The phone rings. I hear Mother hollering, saying it’s my friend from Dad’s lab. We talk for thirty seconds, but it’s enough. I get back to Hannah, and when there’s another call for me, it’s Dirty Ben. I pick up in the yellow room. He wants to know how I am. Fine. What’s new? Nothing. You feeling any better? I dunno. The conversation lurches thus until he mentions Eric. Now I am all ears. Did he say anything about me?

  “You really need to stop calling them.”

  I am incensed. My nerves are starting to go. “Lemme tell you something, Ben.” And I tell him good. Only I lose the anger real fast. I say, “You know I was only with Eric once, right?”

  “Luce, this really isn’t any of my business—”

  “—but that one time, I was sober. You know I never had sober sex before? I was always too afraid. Like I was about to be found out somehow.”

  “Lucy—”

  “—but with him, it was different. And forget the sex part. I mean across the board. You have any idea what that’s like? After so much time alone to have someone you can actually talk to? Someone who isn’t repelled by your inner life? Someone who maybe actually cherishes it?”

  “Yes. But he’s married, honey.”

  “I know. And no one is at fault, except me. Kam didn’t know what I felt, I didn’t tell her. Didn’t tell anyone. I’m just not one for talk, I guess.”

  “But you two have been friends since you were ten or something.”

  “So? You’ve lived in your apartment for, what, six years? How intimate are you with the wall?”

  “You are not a wall.”

  “It’s a metaphor.”

  “You are not a wall.”

  The sigh that booms out my mouth startles us both. A booming sigh.

  He says, “I told Eric you mixed up the dates, if that helps.”

  “But I did mix them up. What, he thinks I missed it on purpose? Oh, God. This humiliation never ends.”

  I stand up to reg
roup. The coil between phone and cradle is so long, I could probably swaddle myself like a mummy or skin stump. I pace. Over the years, many specialists have told me I need to feel the feelings. But when the experience of hurt begins to feel like a dry heave, I think you do better to suppress with all you got.

  “Lucy,” he says.

  I answer. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ll stop calling them.”

  “You can call me, instead.”

  If this is meant to hoist my mood, it has the opposite effect.

  “You still there?” he says. “Hey, do you want to come with me to a meeting?” He means a twelve-step thing, which seems pointless at the moment.

  “Not really. I hate hearing all that crap over and over. Besides, I got rehab coming up, so I’m good.”

  “That is ridiculous. But look, you know where to find us when you change your mind.”

  I love his certainty. As if when I see the light, he’ll be waiting. We say bye. I say it as if I’ve just been denied a lolly by my mom. He says it like a married guy who’s got a future.

  I listen to the dial tone, and then to Agneth and Isifrid, who’ve been eavesdropping on multiple extensions.

  I know what Izzy’s thinking so I say, “Not a chance. Ben’s done with our kind. He doesn’t deal.”

  “How tedious,” she says, and hangs up.

  This leaves me and Agneth. “Agneth,” I say. “What the hell am I going to do? What are we gonna do? I just got a really scary call from the lab.”

  “And I don’t want to know. I’m going to bed,” she says, and hangs up.

  But I find this unacceptable. Down the hall from the kitchen, down another hall, and to the right is her room, itself the largest of three earmarked for the domestic live-in help. A hundred years ago, I bet it was adolescent serving girls riven with syphilis. During my family’s tenure, it was the nannies, and after that, a trio of empty rooms Agneth commandeered for purposes that seemed to change yearly. She once had a terrarium going, for plants that needed little to no sunlight. Later, she let Hannah devise an exercise room for her Peruvian guinea pig, never mind that the pig was lethargic. And timid. For instance, no way was he getting in that high-rise hamster wheel or, for that matter, the nine feet of piping Hannah had put down. So the room was a bust and anyway, the pig, Tesla, died shortly thereafter from an erupted blister made fatal by previously undiagnosed hemophilia. Agneth shut the door on the room after that—the space was tainted—which left her with sleeping chambers that adjoined the last room, which is where I find her now. She is sitting at a table, hunched over a giant square of posterboard.

  I ask what she’s doing. She says did I knock? I rap my knuckles against the wall and sit down.

  “You can stay, but I don’t want to hear any plague talk.”

  I notice she’s opened a new box of surgical masks. I notice ten unopened boxes in the closet. We both know these measures are absurd. Like the plague can’t penetrate a synthetic dime-store membrane of the sort veiling my nana’s respiratory apparatus.

  “Fine,” I say. “You’ll find out soon—”

  But she tut-tuts me, which has the effect of defeating whatever urge I had to talk at all.

  I lean over the board. It is so large, it occupies the entire table, which seats twelve.

  After a moment I cannot resist and say, “Nana, what the hell is this?”

  “Have a look,” she says, and hands me a magnifying glass. The print is legible from close range but the glass is welcome. I scan a section of what appears to be a diagram. “Okay,” I say. “This is the most chaotic family tree I’ve ever seen. Who are these people? And why are the dates all messed up?”

  I see her grin and think: You have got to be kidding. I walk to the end of the table and sure enough, there’s Knut the Soft right alongside Izzy’s name. So this is our family tree with ornament. I see Knut, I see the peasant waif who was Knut before Knut, and the cave guy who was the peasant. It stops there, which means I am very much wanting to say something about the newt who became Knut, but Agneth seems so serious about these matters, I do not risk it. And anyway, I’m losing my sense of humor the more I peruse the tree.

  “Hannah was a flagellant?” I say. “You made her a flagellant? Good grief, that’s horrible.”

  “I didn’t make her anything. And it’s worse than horrible. But it helps me understand her better.”

  “Oh, come on. Is this how you explain away everything? We are who we are just because we’re channeling some other person’s ethic?”

  She stands up with more vim than should be allowed a woman of her age and drapes a sheet over the board. “Wait,” I say. “I didn’t find myself. Where am I on the tree?” I start to lift the sheet but she snatches the hem from my hand. I step back. “Are you saying I’m worse than a flagellant? What, was I Mengele?”

  She thinks I’m kidding and says, “Don’t belittle phenomena you cannot understand. But to answer your questions: yes, reincarnation accounts for many things.”

  I sit on the floor, cross-legged. “You know, it’s convenient the way you use it to absolve people. Like Izzy can’t help herself because she’s some pansy Viking. It’s lazy.”

  “It’s not. And don’t talk about your mother that way. If you really want to discuss this, fine, but then you’ll have to change your tone. It’s arrogant. Hubris killed the cat, you know.”

  “No, the cat had nine lives, which you, especially, should appreciate.”

  “And now you are just being rude. Good night,” she says, and opens the door for me.

  “Nana, I’m sorry. I was just kidding. I’m stressed out. That call from the lab was really bad!”

  She pecks me on the cheek, and, before shutting the door, says, “You can hear them, by the way. Voices from the past. They are there if you want them. They speak to us.”

  “What? Don’t talk like that. It makes me think you’re crazy. And you are not crazy.”

  “I might be,” she says, and grins.

  I trudge down the hall. My body feels like one fat cramp. Jesus fuck. My friend at the lab? He says someone in Minnesota just got sick with superplague. They are short on details but long on gist: the man is gonna die pronto.

  Five

  Radbard begat Randver begat Sigurd Randversson begat Ragnar Lodbrok, Bjorn Ironside, Ivar the Boneless, Sigurd Snake in the Eye, Halfdan White Shirt, Sigurd Schlangenaug, Orm Koenig, Erik der Gott Uppsala Koenig, and Knut the Soft, whose epithet I call my own.

  What can be said of me? Knut delights in a hearty meal. The ground beef, sweet corn, mashed potato mash. Fit for a king. I am no king. These britches scythe into my groin and buttocks for I ’ave outgrown them, and skins are few. Wish I could drop pounds as well as me aitches.

  But this is what we do. The dead eat shepherd’s pie. Here I am joined by other members of the family, none of whom I like. There is a leprous pygmy-unfortunate who flings meat across the table with annoying brio. There is a woman whose clothes never dry. And a lad whose silverware I confiscated for sheer tedium of having to watch him prod his eyeballs. Fun, right? But then my kin are not much to speak of, either. Regardless, there is no escaping family, then or now. My experiences of the world are conjugate. And, as always, I am in many places and times at once.

  It is midway through the ninth century. We are kings of the sea come to the Isle of Man from the south, round the butt of Essex and up the Mercian coast. The place is foul. It rains nonstop. The island is only thirteen miles wide, so you can traverse the land a few times daily. Even so, there are mountains and I am fat, so I never actually leave our coastal settlement. I can see land in three directions. There is no one to talk to. The Celts speak a language not even friends in Galloway understand. So mostly I sit alone. And I am lonely.

  In the news: The Carolingian lands are chopped thrice, each ruled by sons of Pious. They have not done well. The Frisia is ours; Nantes is ours; the Elbe is open game. Apparently, my father has just returned from Paris with the Danegeld—seven thousand poun
ds—offered by Charles the Bald. Charles, you see, is a wussy puss. So are his brothers. Whereas the Viking expansion is frustrated by desertion, arson, greed, and suspicion, the Pious heirs are wussy. I can see that now. Language inimical to my era has given me new perspective. Back then we talked valor, truth, honor, loyalty, discipline, and fortitude. Now I just think: Wussies. If I am a soul reinstated, jive revamps my past.

  But to have lived today! Well, I guess I’d miss the headlines. On the eighth June, the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church by rapine and murder. Harrying of the heathen would never make the cover of Time magazine. Rapine, either. No one likes high rhetoric anymore. And our traditions, such as they were, look silly today. I’ve noticed a sect called the Ring of the Troth that trains people to become Godwo/men who will preside over the true folk. There is also the Assembly of the Elder Troth that has designated March 28 a day of remembrance for my father. They find it funny that Ragnar, pagan bogeyman, should sack the Christian stronghold of Paris on Easter Sunday. To memorialize his achievements, they suggest you watch The Vikings, with Ernest Borgnine, compose a swan song, jot down ways to stay young, and cook a Nordic meal.

  As if this were not insulting enough, I am instantiated in a woman who hosts pagan revival meetings in her living room. A woman who serves pigs in a blanket and lamb shank. The indignity is troubling. Especially since the pagan faith suffuses our lives with color and story. Our ethos is polychrome. And polytheism is the seat of art.

  Among our gods, there are the Norns, in whose trinity time is measured: past, present, future. There is the rooster Vithofrir, who sits in the ash tree waiting to cue Ragnarook, the annihilation of all things. There is Jormungand, who lies coiled around the globe, tail in mouth, panting. Come the arch-winter, he will witness the sun’s demise, the moon eaten, and the stuff of earth called to battle. Gods, giants, dwarfs, and men shall conduct a gorgeous slaughter that will empty the world of everything as we know it. Only two shall remain, Lif and Lifthraser, to start anew in the arable land. For meat they shall feed on morning dew, and from both shall man be reborn. So sayeth Hrofl Yngling on this spring night on Man. We are gathered about a flame, listening to song.