by Joy Williams
But this was the only time a disclosure occurred, and I am more cautious now in conversation. I find I want neither the past nor the future illuminated. But my discomfort is growing that my boy will find access to other people, people we do not know, like the woman the next town over who died in a fire of her own setting, or even one of Jeanette’s unfortunate customers. That I will come home one evening and that Colson will be not himself but a stranger whose death means little to me and that even so we will talk quietly and inconsequentially and with puzzled desperation.
The week passes. Colson has a tutor in mathematics for the summer who is oblivious to the situation and I have the office I’m obliged to occupy. Colson wants to be an engineer or an architect but he has difficulty with concepts of scale and measurability. The tutor claims he’s progressing nicely but Colson never talks about these hours, only stubbornly reiterates his desire to create soaring nonutilitarian spaces.
At the end of the week I return to Come and See! My passage through the construction zone is much the same. I suppose change will appear to come all at once. Suddenly there will be a smooth six-lane road with additional turning lanes and sidewalks with high baffle walls concealing a remaining landscape soon to be converted to housing. The walls will be decorated with abstract designs or sometimes the stylized images of birds. I’ve seen it before. Everyone’s seen it before.
Jeanette is the only one there. I feel immediately uncomfortable and settle quickly into my customary chair. There is the paper clip, as annoying and meaningless a presence as ever.
“There’s a flu going around,” she says.
“The flu?” I say. “Everyone has the flu?”
“Or they’re afraid of contracting the flu,” she says. “The hospital is even restricting visitors. You haven’t heard about the flu?”
“Only in the most general terms,” I say. “I didn’t think there was an epidemic.”
“Pandemic, possibly a pandemic. We should all be in our homes, trying not to panic.”
We wait but no one shows up. There’s a large window in the room that looks out over the parking lot, but the lot is empty and continues to be empty. The sky is doing that strange thing it does, brightening fiercely before dark.
“Why don’t we begin anyway?” she says. “ ‘For where two are gathered in my name…’ and so on. Or is it three?”
“Why would it be three?” I say. “I don’t think it’s three.”
“You’re right,” she says.
She has a round pale face and small hands. Nothing about her is attractive, though she is agreeable, certainly, or trying to be.
“I’m not dying,” I say. God only knows what possessed me.
“Of course not!” she exclaims, her round face growing pink. “Goodness!”
But then she says, “On Wednesday, Wednesday I think it was, it was certainly not Thursday, I was in this woman’s room where the smell of flowers was overwhelming. You could hardly breathe and I knew her friends meant well, but I offered to remove the arrangements, there were more than a dozen of them, I’m surprised there wasn’t some policy restricting their number, and she said, ‘I’m not dying,’ and then she died.”
“You never know,” I say.
“I hope they let me back soon.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
“I meant to say why would they?”
She stands up but then sits down again. “No,” she says, “I’m not leaving.”
“It’s disgusting what you’re doing, you’re like the thief’s accomplice,” I say. “No one can be certain about these things.”
Suddenly she appears not nervous or accommodating in the least.
We do not speak further, just sit there staring at each other until the sexton arrives and insists it’s time to lock the place up.
At home, Colson is watching a television special on our dying oceans.
“Please turn that off,” I say.
“Grandma wanted to watch it.”
He has made popcorn and poured it into a large blue bowl that is utterly unfamiliar to me. It’s a beautiful bowl of popcorn.
“You have another bowl like that?” I ask. “I want to make myself a drink.”
He laughs like my wife might have when she still loved me, but then returns to watching the television.
“This is tragic,” he says. “Can anything be done?”
“So much can be done,” I say. “But everything would have to be different.”
“Well,” he sighs, “now Grandma and Poppa know. She wanted to watch it.”
“Have you heard anything about a flu,” I ask. “Does anyone you know have the flu?”
“Grandma died of the flu.”
“No. They died in a car accident. You know that.”
“Sometimes they get mixed up,” he says.
Colson’s the age I was when I was told about the country. Ten years later I’d be married. I married too young and unwisely, for sure.
“Do they sometimes tell you stories you don’t believe?”
“Daddy,” he says with no inflection, so I don’t know what he means.
We finish the popcorn. He did a good job. Every kernel was popped. I take the bowl to the sink and rinse it out carefully, then take a clean dish towel from a drawer and dry it. It really is an extraordinarily lovely bowl. I don’t know where to put it because I don’t know where it came from.
A few days later my father is back. He was a handsome man with handsome thick gray hair.
“Son,” he says, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“It’s all right,” I say.
“No, it’s not all right. I wish I knew what to tell you.”
“Colson, honey,” I say. “Stop.”
“That’s no way to have an understanding,” he says. “Your mother and I just wish it were otherwise.”
“Me too,” I say.
“We wish we could help but there’s so much they haven’t figured out. You’d think by now, but they haven’t.”
“Who’s they,” I ask reluctantly.
But Colson doesn’t seem to have heard me. He runs his fingers through his shaggy hair, which looks damp and hot. My boy has always run hot. I wonder if he’s bathing and brushing his teeth. My poor boy, I think, my poor dear boy. Someone should remind him.
The following afternoon when Colson is with his tutor, who, I think, is deceiving both of us, though to all appearances he is a forthright and sincere young man, I drive almost one hundred miles to see Lucy, the other elephant. She is being sponsored by two brothers who maintain the county’s graveyards, some sort of perpetual care operation, though to be responsible for an elephant is quite another matter, I would think. The brothers are extremely private and shun publicity. It was only after great effort that I learned anything about them at all or the actual whereabouts of Lucy. Someone—though neither of the brothers, a friend of the brothers is how I imagine him—agreed to show me around the grounds that she now occupies, but I find that once I reach the gate I cannot continue.
I turn back, ashamed, and more estranged from my situation than ever.
When I return home the tutor has left and Colson is putting his drawings in order, cataloging them by some method unknown to me. When my mother and father were taken from us so abruptly I knew that Colson was terribly bereaved. Still, he did not want my father’s safari hat or his water-bottle holster. He did not want his watch or his magnetic travel backgammon. Nor did he want my mother’s collection of ink pens, which I suggested would be ideal for his drawings. He wanted no mementos. Instead he went directly to communication channels that are impossible to establish.
“Where were you, Daddy,” Colson asks.
“Why, at work,” I say quickly.
Surely I am back at my usual time. I seldom lie, indeed I cannot even remember the circumstances of my last falsehood. Why would he ask such a question? I kiss him and go into the kitchen to make myself a drink bu
t then remember that I have stopped drinking.
“A lady came by today but I told her I didn’t know where you were.”
“What did she look like,” I ask, and of course he describes Jeanette to a T.
I am so weary I can hardly lift my hand to my head. I must make dinner for us but I think the simplest omelet is beyond my capabilities now. I suggest that we go out but he says he has already eaten with the tutor. They had tacos made and sold from a truck painted with flowers and sat at a picnic table chained to a linden tree. I have no idea what he’s talking about. My rage at Jeanette is almost blinding and I gaze at him without seeing as he orders and then reorders his papers, some of which seem to be marked with only a single line. I feel staggeringly innocent. That is the unlikely word that comes to me. Colson puts away his papers and smiles, a smile so radiant that I close my eyes without at all wanting to, and then rather gently somehow it is day again and I am striding through the bustling wasteland to Come and See! The reflection concerns Gregory of Nyssa. He is a popular subject but I am forever having difficulty in recalling what I already know about him. Something about the Really Real and its ultimate importance to us, though the Really Real is inaccessible to our understanding. Food for thought indeed, and over and over again.
When the meeting concludes and we are dismissed I practically hurl myself on Jeanette, who has uncharacteristically contributed nothing to the conversation this night.
“Don’t ever come to my house again,” I say.
“Was I really there, then? I thought I had the wrong place. Was that your son? A fine little boy. He can certainly keep a secret, can’t he.”
“I’ll call the police,” I say.
“Goodness,” she laughs. “The police.”
It sounded absurd, I have to agree.
“I was concerned about you,” she says. “You haven’t been here for a while. You’ve been avoiding us.”
“Don’t ever again…” I say.
“A delightful little boy,” she continues. “But you mustn’t burden him with secrets.”
“…come to my house.” I couldn’t be more insistent.
“Actually,” she says, “no one would fault you if you stopped attending. How many times must we endure someone making a hash of Gregory of Nyssa? People are so tenacious when they should be free. Free!”
I begin to speak but find I have no need to speak. The room is more familiar to me than I would care to admit. Who was it whose last breath didn’t bring him home?
Or am I the first?
The Mother Cell
She had been living there for a few months when an acquaintance said, “I think you should meet this person. She’s new. She lives over by the conservation easement, the one with the moths.” She, too, was the mother of a murderer, that was the connection, but Emily and this Leslie didn’t hit it off particularly well, though they were both fiercely nonjudgmental, of course. But then another mother, well into her twilight years but unaccompanied by caregivers, moved down less than three months later, around the Fourth of July, the time of pie and fireworks and bunting-draped baby carriages. It was as though some mysterious word had gotten out. These things happen, like when highly allergic people, practically allergic to life itself, all gravitate to some mountain in Arizona, or when a bayside town in Maine becomes the locus for lipstick lesbians overnight. Penny arrived next, followed by a few more mothers in quick succession until the influx stopped.
Nobody had to tell them outright that they had better be model citizens. When a bear mauled a young couple out at the state park, the mothers worried that the incident might be perceived as their inadvertent doing for weren’t black bears shy as a rule? And this was an extremely aggressive bear and small, hardly more than a cub, but determined and deliberate.
One mother, Francine, thought a hunter had shot the bear with a hallucinogen prior to the attack, just for fun, to see what would happen. “It must get boring for them to just shoot something and have it die,” Francine said. “Someone shot it with a mind-altering drug.”
“Most everything around here has been shot out for years now,” another mother said. “Where did this bear even come from?”
“Exactly,” Francine said.
The eldest mother had the sugar and was so arthritic she had long enjoyed the awe of X-ray technicians. She was half blind too and described herself as dumb as a box of nails, but she knew how to keep on living. Whereas Penny, who wasn’t even forty—she’d had Edward when she was sixteen—died of lung cancer without having ever smoked a cigarette, even in the worst of times.
It was Penny’s death that brought them together, though they weren’t about to take up the task of writing to her boy in prison. Penny had liked to say there was a part in each of us that had never sinned and that was the part of Edward she addressed when she wrote to him. But as the eldest mother pointed out, that was the same part that was never born and will never die. It was thus irrelevant. Better to address a plate with a covered bridge printed on it.
They still thought of themselves as being seven in number even though without Penny it was six. In general they believed that the dead remained around, fulfilling all but the most technical requirements of residency on earth, yet relieved of the banality of daily suffering. In this respect, they could argue, though they never did, that their children’s victims weren’t as bad off as commonly assumed.
Fathers didn’t flock like this, they agreed. Leslie had stuck it out with a father the longest. Their boy, Gordon, had done something terrible, just terrible. And he had been one of those kids who had never caused a bit of trouble. This was scarcely believable given what happened but there was the record, their boy, Gordon’s record, or rather the lack of it. Leslie said that after the trial, the outcome of which was never in doubt, she and the father tended more and more to behave as though they were performing before an audience. Not a sold-out house, to be sure, but a respectable enough number in attendance to ensure that the show wouldn’t close for a while. When the lights dimmed and they were alone, except for the audience, the spectators and listeners, it became all choked poise and memory pieces between them, with the occasional brilliant burst of anger and loathing.
“It essentially became vanity,” Leslie said.
The eldest mother said, “But what can you expect from men? They’re like a virus with a penchant for the heart. They got a special affinity for attacking the heart. You can recover, sure, but the damage is done.”
The fathers, it turned out, had all gone back to work. To a man they had returned to their places of employment. And they were doing all right. I’m doing, they’d say, when asked. Some had remarried. One had had his impulsive vasectomy reversed.
Barbara’s daughter had been dubbed the End of the Dream murderer by the media, for that was what the girl said in the course of her serial rampage.
“It’s only her who knows if she said it,” Barbara argued. “Her saying she said it doesn’t make it so. She was always that kind of kid, saying all kinds of crap and expecting you to believe her.”
“Was she Buddhist,” Leslie asked.
“Jesus no,” Barbara said. “She didn’t even do yoga. She didn’t do nothing until she did.”
“You can be a murderer without being a liar,” the eldest mother said.
None of the mothers had pets. The children had all had pets of one kind or another and homes had to be found for them. There were hundreds of people out there who keenly wanted murderers’ pets and by their very ambition and craving were utterly inappropriate as adopters. Sometimes these pets’ stories ended badly too.
“It takes sixty-three days to make a dog,” the eldest mother said. “Two hundred and seventy days to make a human being, give or take a few.”
The mothers were atypical in that each had brought forth only one child. In their day, two had been the norm. Now three was the new two, whereas one was the old zero.
“People had more interesting thoughts before mass inoculations,” Barbara
maintained. “More generous and less damaging thoughts.”
“Who knows what’s in all the inoculations they give the little babies,” Francine said. “Oh, they tell you, but still you don’t know. How could you?”
“Minds used to move like rivers but they don’t want our minds moving like that,” Emily said. “They want to channelize our thinking, and some people can’t tolerate their minds being dammed. They noticed it right away, whereas others never do, and they can’t tolerate it.”
“Damned,” Leslie murmured.
“Exactly,” Francine said.
Francine’s boy had claimed that the family he’d slaughtered would have killed hundreds of people if they’d been left to prosper.
“You mean because they were into making pharmaceuticals or beer?” Barbara asked.
“I’m not defending him, but it could very well have been true.”
“Genuine thinking is rare,” the eldest mother said.
“I saw a sculpture of the river god once,” Leslie said. “It was the most frightening work of art I’ve ever witnessed. Someone blew it up, I heard. It was just too frightening.”
Emily looked at the bottle she was drinking water from. “How can it be pure if it’s enhanced?” she said to no one in particular.
Pam then commenced to tell a story about gods. It was rendered fairly incoherent in her telling but it concerned a group of lost Greek sailors on a fishing boat who happened upon a desolate island where they found an old man in a hut attended by a bedraggled, almost featherless though immense bird and a large old hairless goat whose nipples were nonetheless rosy and whose udders were full of milk.
