by Fiona Maazel
Stanley: Did you watch the news today? Every channel but Fox says it’s gotten out of California.
Marcus: Can we not talk about this? I can’t talk about this!
Eric: Everyone’s saying Malthusian this, Malthusian that. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Forget survival of the fittest. Forget restoring the ecological accord between flower and fauna. This plague thing, it’s the universe telling us to say: Fuck it. Just bear with me here. In times of crisis, people turn barbaric. They rely on instincts, which are primal. And what I’m saying is that the way we are now, the way we live, it antagonizes the primal. Shuts it up. That’s what we spend all our conscious time doing—suppressing the primal. And because we do it so well, Nature has to intervene. So she gives us a plague and says: Now see how well you do, you enlightened and elevated people with your Constitution and your laws, your rehabs and your jails, your strength and insipid pretensions to the moral high ground.
Marcus says, rather quietly: In sum, fuck it?
Eric: That’s right! You got it.
Meantime, Wanda has sat down. Intervention on hold.
I say, “So lemme get this straight. Because Nature presents us with a challenge that solicits our baser instincts, she’s advising us to fuck it all? To just say, Screw it? What if she’s saying: I challenge you and in so doing give you the chance to rise above yourself, to face extinction and to prevail, knowing you stayed true to the principles one thousand years of culture have bored into your brain?”
“Pardon me,” says Isifrid, which is a shocker. This whole thing started with her, but who can remember that far back? She sips a cup of tea. Says: “All this talk of Nature is well and good, but very much beside the point.”
She sounds so commanding, no one presses her for more except Jumbo Prawn, who’s looking really tired of all this shit, and says, “And you are an authority because … ?”
I laugh. Thus far, the epidemic is not making people barbaric so much as nasty.
Wanda steps in. “What she means is that your discussion is not practical.”
“No,” says Mother. “What I mean is that there’s some asshole out there poisoning everyone. Not Nature, not God, not Odin.”
Marcus says who’s Odin?
“A Norse god, you idiot.” This from me because if there’s gonna be nastiness, I’m in.
Stanley looks at his watch and yawns hugely. Well, would you look at the time.
Wanda has a you’ve won the battle, not the war look about her that means she’ll be back tomorrow. Marcus already has his coat on. Jumbo Prawn is collecting glasses. Only person to make no attempt at the door is Eric.
Twenty-six
You couldn’t ignore it: The plague had breached quarantine and was heading southeast. Eric and I watched the news late into the night. Fifteen people had busted through a checkpoint in Sacramento. They were armed and possibly infected, you couldn’t know for at least a day or two. The National Guard was ordered to shoot first, question later. The escapees were three families and their children. The children put a face on things. Their pictures were arrayed along highways like pennants at the dealership. You saw them at bus depots and train stations. You got the feeling that every hunter in America was loading his gun.
We were in the yellow room on parallel couches. It was where you went to think in twos. I used to find Mother and Dad in here all the time. You’d lie down and have a catch with whatever food availed itself, usually an orange or a peanut. Tonight we had an orange. The volley is meditative, really, the back and forth. So is the counting.
Eric said, “So are you scared?”
“Yes and no. I can’t seem to accept this is actually happening.”
“Me, either. Sixty-three.”
“I might never accept it until it’s in this house.”
“You’re going to stay here?”
“Aren’t you? I haven’t really thought about it.”
“You should start. Sixty-eight.”
“Well, where are you going to go?”
“Kam’s parents still have the house. I bet you could come. If it came to that.”
The thing about the volley, you’re not supposed to take your eye off the orange. This is the only way you can converse freely. As soon as you make eye contact, it’s all over.
He sat up. “What? It’s not that crazy under the circumstances. All your life you’ve lived like a child.”
“You used to like that about me.”
“I used to like a lot of things.”
“What else?”
He laughed. I could make a game out of anything. “Let’s see. I used to like those winter gloves where if it got really cold, they turned colors.”
“Not colors. Didn’t they have pictures or something? Like at three below you’d see a Gobot?”
“Don’t remember. Also, Buddy Schimelhorn used to steal mine the first day it snowed.”
“Ah, Buddy Schimelhorn, where are you now.”
“He runs a day camp. Buddy’s Wood.”
“He does not.”
“Nope, it’s true.”
I returned to the volley position. “That is absurd. Seventy.”
“Seventy-one.”
Stanley came through the swing door. “What’s doing here?”
I said, “You’re looking at it.”
“Count me in.”
He positioned a chair at the foot of the couches so that we made a U.
“Nice work today,” Eric said. “About what’s her name. Wanda?”
“Can you imagine?” I said. “Trying to have a spontaneous intervention? At a wake? Something’s not right about that woman.”
“She meant well,” Stanley said.
I snorted. Seems like there’s always someone around to make you feel schmucky no matter what you say.
“In that case, why not ask her to surrogate?”
“Surrogate for what?” Eric said. “Ninety.”
“Long story,” I said.
“Ninety-three.”
“My wife passed away, but froze her eggs.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Are you and your wife planning on kids?”
“Stanley!” I nailed him in the chest. The orange, dented, retired at a hundred.
“Okay,” he said, standing up. “Guess that’s my cue,”
We watched him leave.
Eric said, “Are you dating that guy?”
“I wouldn’t call it that, no.”
“Uh-huh.”
I took another orange from the bowl. This one was smaller, more aerodynamic.
“You know,” I said, “your to hell with everything theory is worrisome.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s licensed anarchy.”
“It’s not. It’s carpe diem.”
“I don’t see you doing anything differently,” I said. The bitterness in my voice was impossible to ignore. But he ignored it anyway.
“Six. What’s the world record with this?”
“Seven hundred. Me and Hannah, day after my dad died.”
“I hear you’re going back to rehab. That’s good you know. I’m proud of you.”
“Am I being patronized?”
“You are impossible.”
Eye contact.
“I should be going.”
I nodded. Like Marcus, it was, in fact, unclear why he was still at my house. A part of me had hope, which another part snuffed out. In the last couple months I had learned that to love a married man also means wanting to protect him from wrecking his life because of you.
“Kam’s in Italy,” he said. “Else she would have come.”
The hope flared up anew. Look at me, here I am, hello!
“She’s producing a fashion shoot at the opera house in Milan.”
He said this with pride, which seemed charming until it wasn’t. Proud of me for rehab, proud of Kam for her life.
“She’s trying to get a lot done because she might be taking a leave in
a few months.”
“Yeah, well, we all might be taking a leave in a few months.”
“Right.”
“Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry about the phone calls. I was, I dunno, in bad shape for a while there.”
“Things are better now?”
I shrugged. “I’m trying. I go to Texas next week. Maybe I’ll intercept the plague and do everyone a favor.”
“Call me from out there, okay?”
I walked him to the door and thanked him for coming.
“Of course.”
“Aggie appreciates it. She’s up there, you know.”
“Right.”
The elevator was on its way. “She asked me to disperse her ashes.”
“Really?”
“She asked if you’d do it with me.”
He looked skeptical, which made me feel pathetic. And then more pathetic. Because the fact was, I loved this person. I was trying, always, to do the right thing, but I loved this person and did not know how to feel otherwise. Also, this was not the farewell I had in mind. More like a kiss that veers right at the last moment.
“No, really. I swear. Why would I make that up?”
“No, no, I believe you. When?”
“When I get back. Good night.”
I made to shut the door.
“Lucy, come on. I believe you. It’s fine.”
“Get home safe,” I said, and pecked him on the cheek.
The elevator took him away. I put my ear to the door and listened for it to open eight floors below. I had the stupid idea that if I listened long enough, he’d come back.
After, I checked myself the way you might post—car crash: are you hurt, where and how bad? But it was nothing major, just the nicks and dents your body sustains daily.
Stanley was in my room lying in bed with hands clasped beneath his head.
“What a day,” I said. “Move over?”
I put my ear to his chest, then his stomach. I could hear his dinner having a party.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. Oh, boy. “Maybe I could stay here while you’re in Texas?”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s fine with me. But I don’t really call the shots.”
“The other thing I was thinking—” Oh, boy. “Maybe you should take your mother with you.”
I jerked away from him so fast, you’d think he was sewage. “Are you kidding? Me and her in the middle of the desert?!”
“You and your mother in rehab, yes.”
“And Hannah?”
“I’ll be here.”
“Oh, I get it. Ditch me and Izzy and you get the run of the place. Nice, Stanley. Nice try.”
“She’s dying, you know.”
I drooped. “She might not be.”
“She needs you. And I think she wants to go.”
“She told you that?”
“In a way. But anyone can tell she needs you.”
“I don’t think I can get clean under those circumstances.”
He looked me square in the face. “You don’t think you can get clean period.”
He made a good point. I tried to burrow under his shirt. “What’s wrong with me? How can you stand me?”
He sat up on his elbows. “I see through you is all.”
I burrowed deeper.
“I’m starting to worry, Luce. People are actually dying from plague. Like many people, not just here and there.”
“I know.”
“So you have to come back and be here with me.”
“I know.”
He lay back down and pulled my face from under his shirt. “I have a question for you. And be serious. If the plague really does get here, will you be sorry to die? I mean for real. No jokes.”
I smiled. There were few things I liked better than to contemplate my own death. “I don’t want to die in agony, if that’s what you mean. And I don’t want to leave Hannah. But I don’t know. I guess I want both. I want to die, but still be here. Like when I fantasize about it, it’s not a Tom Sawyer thing where I want to see everyone mourn me and say how great I was. Frankly, who’d even say that? It’s more like I want to experience the relief of not being alive, but I can’t do that unless I’m alive.”
Stanley laughed. “That’s one hell of a problem.”
I laughed. “Don’t I know it.”
“I read somewhere that you’re not supposed to die without being a little happy first.”
“Okay, the bathroom stall is not a source of wisdom you can share with me.”
But by then, of course, we had stopped laughing. And I was ready to go.
ii
Twenty-seven
Texas is brown. Wherever you look. Not like bouquets of oak and chocolate, not like a brown bonanza, just a deployment of tones, each more drab than the next. Out the airplane, it’s acres of brown and dead stuff. Trees and brush. Here at the airport, it’s brown plus kids with guns. Army kids in oatmeal vests. I try to give them a wide berth, though they are everywhere. Now that a toddler bearing plague is the nation’s public enemy number one, I am feeling more threatened by men with guns than ever. Kids with guns, I’m not so sure. Likely they are worse. Surely in Texas, they are worse. I have prejudices about the South that embarrass me, but not so much that I want to give them up.
We head to the baggage claim, and I try to keep a low profile. Turns out by try I mean fail. I am with Mother after all. I still can’t believe she wanted to come. I can’t believe I asked. We are booked for a whole month and already she’s annoying. That cadet on his cell phone? He doesn’t want to talk to her. Likewise the soldier kid humping his duffel. I grab her arm and say, “Stop it.”
We were supposed to be met at the gate by a counselor from Bluebonnet, but I don’t see him. Just as well since right off the plane, Mother split for the bathroom, where I know she’s rubbing coke. Couldn’t even wait to parse a line. I imagine the logic is that if anyone opens her stall, they’ll find her with fingers between her legs, which just isn’t so weird in a bathroom stall. I’ve done that before, the mucous membrane thing, because the twinning of drugs and orgasm is good.
Experience has just borne out the following rumor: It’s ten times easier to fly with coke than grass. Pop it in a compact and be on your way. Overnight the rest to a local P.O. Mother’s going to rehab, but with zero interest in the rehab part. I think she just got scared at the exact moment I was leaving, and by the time she recommitted herself to a life of soul-sapping malaise and suicidal ideation, it was too late; we were here.
I am, perhaps, no less ambivalent. I came willingly enough, though I don’t have much interest in the rehab part, either. Well, some interest, which, in terms of things I want to accomplish before I die, values rehab alongside sky diving and children.
We spot our counselor eating a Nutter Butter sandwich cookie and browsing the magazine rack at a newsstand. His name is Robert, and he’s not helping with our luggage. He does mention a town car. And that there’s plenty of bottled water for the trip. I have brought one suitcase, Mother has four. Mine is mostly filled with her stuff.
Robert’s town car is more like a flatbed with room in the cab for two, three if you squeeze.
Mother says, “You’re kidding, yes?”
He says no. Also: something something short a car, something something mother daughter cozy.
I opt to sit in the truck bed. Texas sky, open road, no problem. And in fact, it’s no problem. So that I don’t fly overboard, I get on my back and splay legs. Besides the cow-patty stench of whatever normally gets freighted back here, it’s fine. Especially the wind, which is so loud and ambient, it seems to take up residency in my head and crowd out all my thoughts.
We get to Bluebonnet in three hours. It looks like a single-story roadside motel, only there’s no road for fifty miles in any direction. Even the road we take is not much of a road. More like a gravel drive that veers off the highway and ends in a cul-de-sac. When w
e arrive, a woman in tailored slacks suit, gray-green, is waiting for us outside. She’s got a clipboard. Her heels kick up dust that cottons to the hem of her pants. I’m unclear why you’d wear a suit in the desert, but then Aggie did say we’d be among a diverse and affluent clientele who probably respond better to Versace than chaps.
The clipboard’s name is Susan. She’s been assigned to our case. Our case? Like there’s only one? Because, I tell her, we are definitely two.
“Actually,” she says, “here at Bluebonnet we put a premium on family and think team recovery, especially in the family, works quite well. Don’t worry.”
She has gathered half her hair into a ponytail trussed with a ruby barrette. This gives her the appearance of a cheerleader circa 1950 or a prostitute circa now. The way she’s looking at me, though, I get the sense I’m not stealing any hearts, either. I ask Mother to confirm. She says I look like a tornado blew through my grill.
We all get in a van and head farther into the desert, where, lo and behold, there’s another roadside motel, U-shaped around an empty swimming pool qua terrarium qua morgue. Like those turtles will ever get out.
Susan says, “You are in adjoining rooms, F-10 and 11. You’ll find a binder with a schedule. Here are the keys. For now, just wash up and we’ll see you at dinner.”
Off goes the buggy, which leaves me and Mother stranded. In the desert.
We part. My room’s the size of a luxury Port-o-Potty. Maybe two. It lacks for amenities. No clock radio. The bedside lamp needs a bulb. Water trickles from the faucet, the drain’s got a rust aureole. On the plus side, there’s sconce lighting above my bed, frosted glass. Wall-to-wall carpeting, ochre pile. There’s rehab literature in every drawer. The pages are thumbed and soft. I have dread of literature as public facility because I am always thinking someone has ejaculated into the pages. So far, though, I have yet to meet with this problem.
Mother opens the door that connects our rooms. She looks panicked. “There’s no TV,” she says. “What am I supposed to do without a TV?”
“I don’t know. Sober up, maybe?”
