When Dave disappeared with the rest of the group, Gerry rested her hand on Helen’s arm. “You’re shivering, dear. Are you all right?”
Helen looked at the diamond ring nestled in her sleeve, inches from her sutures, and smelled something cloying, talcum powder or lilac sachet. “We’ve had a rough few days.”
“I was going to ask about your husband’s bandages, but I didn’t want to be nosy.”
“We missed the shuttle. From the Ambassador.” Helen looked into Gerry’s eyes and lowered her face. “Some people set fire to the hotel and attacked him. We walked here.”
Gerry traced a broad circle on Helen’s back with her palm. “I can’t imagine.”
Helen wiped her cheek with her sleeve. “We’ll be all right.”
“But you’re not all right now. Let’s go to my condo. I’ll get you something nice to wear. I’d rather do this than wait for Bud. I can tell you, he won’t be crawling into bed anytime soon.”
“I can’t take your clothes.”
“You need clothes. Nice clothes. Who knows when we’re going home?”
At the mention of home, we felt as Helen did, stirred by yearning for a place long gone. Swept along by soothing chatter, we lurched behind her, forgetting momentarily that Paradise has been destroyed. The condo jarred us from our reverie. It was engulfed by the sort of electric haze that generally fucks up circadian rhythms and makes it impossible for us to keep civilized, nocturnal hours. It was an abattoir for ants and anyone else incautious enough to nick a spot of jam in the fluorescent light of late evening, when humans are most inclined to snack.
“I told Bud not to leave the jam out.” Gerry used a paper towel to shift a jar from the granite countertop to the garbage can. “The ants are going crazy. If there’s even a crumb, they swarm. The maids are useless.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“With everything you’ve been through, I shouldn’t complain.” Gerry swept the sink with a sponge and watched an ant slide down the drain in an eddy of scalding water. “It’s just not as nice as some of the places we’ve stayed.”
“I suppose there’s good and bad in every place.”
“I guess we always try to stay in the good places. By the way, I apologize for what they were saying about welfare cases. People say things and don’t mean them.”
“I couldn’t really hear them.”
“People can be so cruel.” Gerry wiped down the toaster. “Bud laughs at me for cleaning up on vacation. It’s a losing battle. Just keeping things in order.” She drew a bottle from a wine rack and set two glasses on the counter. “When we’re done trying clothes, we’ll have a drink.”
Upstairs, Helen stood beside a poster bed while Gerry pulled blouses and skirts from a walk-in closet.
“It’s like playing dress-up,” Gerry said. “I used to do it all the time with my daughter. She never did learn how to shop. I had to lend her a suit for her first job interview.” She held a wraparound skirt to Helen’s hips and set it beside a sleeveless linen blouse on the bed. “That would be a really cute outfit.”
“Really, a sweater or jacket’s all I need.”
“The blouse is way too small on me.” Gerry leaned over the bed and smoothed the linen. “Funny, but it never fit, even the day I bought it. I don’t know why I always pack it.”
“It’s too nice to borrow.”
“Nothing’s too nice.” Gerry slid a beige sweater from a hanger and guided Helen to the bathroom. “My daughter could get away with anything. I don’t know where she got her genes. So thin, just like you. You’re going to look darling.”
Alone in the bathroom, Helen examined scented soaps wrapped in lace ribbons, bottles of lavender bath salt, and delicate silver chains spilling from a small box. She held a set of pearl teardrops to her ears, opened a tube of red lipstick, and resisted a mad impulse to paint herself as someone else. Finally, she slipped into the blouse and sweater, wrapped her hips in silken folds, and studied the reflection of a woman who could pass for pretty in the pages of a mail-order catalogue. This is self-preservation, she thought. Red wine and well-lit solitude. Shedding the weight of filthy clothes and forgetting.
“You look adorable,” Gerry said, when Helen stepped from the bathroom.
“I feel strange taking these.”
Gerry squeezed Helen’s shoulders. “You can’t survive with just that T-shirt. It doesn’t flatter you. Take off the sweater so I can see what the blouse looks like.”
Helen drew away from Gerry. “It fits perfectly. It’s nice of you to lend it to me.”
“Don’t be shy.” Gerry brushed past Helen, leaving a trace of talcum in her wake. “I have a necklace, too. Just some cheap thing I bought at the airport, but it would be cute with the blouse. You’ll look like a runway model.”
“I can’t.” Helen sat down on the bed and slumped forward.
Gerry turned around. “What’s wrong? You’re shaking again.” She placed her hand on Helen’s shoulder. “You can tell me.”
Helen looked up and studied the soft lines of Gerry’s face, smelled something familiar, something from a recurring dream, and felt her own limbs grow limp. She turned a palm to the ceiling and pulled back her sleeve, heard a sharp intake of air and felt Gerry’s fingers slide down her back. When she looked up, Gerry was standing at the top of the stairs. Helen drew her sleeve down, rose from the bed, and began gathering hangers.
Gerry folded her arms across her chest. “Just leave everything.”
“I can help.” Helen looked at a hanger in her hand.
“You should keep them covered. People might. They might get infected.”
In the kitchen, Gerry returned one wine glass to the cupboard. “The sun goes down so early here. It always feels later than it is.”
“I’ll return your things.”
“Just keep them.” Gerry turned to a trail of ants beside the sink. Her face was drawn from exhaustion. “I’ve never worn the blouse. I didn’t even try it on in the dressing room. I must have been thinking of her. She was just like you. So cruel. Such a waste.” She pulled a paper cocktail napkin from a drawer and began crushing ants. “I assume you know your way back.”
Helen fingered the hem of a linen shirt bought for a dead daughter and left Gerry staring into the drain. She retraced her steps past interlocking pools, sickly aortic shapes aglow in red light. At the sound of breaking waves, she stumbled from the sidewalk and down a dark path, berating herself for fashioning a fantasy of love from a stranger’s pity, for making herself an object of charity and then revulsion. When she reached the beach, she collapsed at the water’s edge and stripped the sweater from her back to expose her arms to salty air. Until midnight, she sat on the beach, following the erratic movements of bats flitting along the shore, trailing her fingers over her arms, and ruminating on departed mothers and dead monkeys.
Those of us gathered around her were grateful to have escaped the tailgate party. The stench on the patio had been enough to conjure the worst sorts of collective memories. We’d witnessed Rome burning when it was less the subject of moral platitudes than a place of real pain, a ruined city filled with the music of a madman’s fiddle, the sort of music that, back in Nero’s day, had made us long for someone like Calypso Rose to rise from the ashes.
Post-traumatic stress, indeed! It’s as common as disturbed dirt among those who have beheld the rise and fall of empires or lurched down streets running with blood. Those of us on the patio were scurrying like mad from rivers of spilled maraschino cherry juice and hideous concoctions bubbling around bits of char.
At first, Dave thought nothing of his inability to detect it—the stench, everyone said, of blackened plastic. He felt unsteady on his feet, dizzied by the heat and too many drinks, but relieved to be back in a familiar element. When he’d first stepped behind the bar, he’d grown anxious, struggling to read a label. His eyes were strained by exhaustion, he told himself, and then poured five shots, dispensing generous measures and garnering attenti
on with his flair. With something close to relief, he fought a tremor in his hand to light a match, lifted his cup, and extinguished a blue flame in his mouth with all the theatricality he’d acquired in countless clubs.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Bud declared. “Down the hatch.”
Seconds later, Bud yanked his hand from his cup’s sagging rim, stomped on a puddle of flame, and kicked off his sandal. As his sandal drifted toward the center of the pool, he stood on one foot, massaging his toes with an ice cube fished from a stranger’s punch.
“No point walking around in one shoe.” He tossed his second sandal into the water, sat down at the pool’s edge, and submerged his feet. “Chlorine will sterilize everything.”
“I told you to use a straw,” Sarah said, when he hobbled back to the bar.
Bud placed a damp bill in front of Dave. “No more Molotov cocktails. It’s whiskey from now on.”
Dave smiled against the pull of surgical tape and settled into the role of bartender. He felt as though he were looking at the world through a pane of liquefying glass, pleasantly detached from his surroundings and oblivious to the smell described by everyone laughing and backing away from snaking flames and melted cups. As the night wore on, though, his senses became uncertain conduits of disjointed perceptions. His fingers tingled at the touch of strangers pressing money into his hands. Stars and strings of electric lights occupied the same flat plane, a dull expanse obliterated by smoke and haze. Women in bikini bottoms and football jerseys staggered past, shrieking, and static filled his ears. He recalled flickering orange light catching a jagged edge of glass and tried to retain an instant already slipping from his mind. He pushed back his cap and dragged his palm across his damp hairline.
“Don’t mean to get into your business, but what the hell happened to your head?”
Dave considered Bud’s face, florid and sickly beneath a string of green and red lights. “Walked into something a few nights ago.”
“Ain’t that what they always say? Hope that little lady isn’t roughing you up. Shit, you hear about that sometimes.”
Marianne pressed against the bar, and Dave pulled his cap down over his forehead.
“Gimme a cherry. A flaming shot an’ a cherry.”
Dave fished a cherry from a jar and placed it on a paper napkin. She peeled it from the napkin and pushed it through her lips, indifferent to a shred of tissue clinging to its underside. Without thinking, he reached into the jar again and placed a cherry in his mouth. He broke its candied skin, tasted something metallic, and wondered if the stench had soured his saliva. He was sniffing the air when Bud spoke.
“I smell like a goddamn gas station. A Manhattan to end the misery.”
“Sorry. Thought you were talking to the bartender.”
Bud brushed a streak of ash from his shirt. “I thought you were the bartender.”
Dave turned a bottle over in his hands, trying to arrange the words breaking apart on its label. He thought of walking away, but leaving because he couldn’t make a drink, because he’d grown tired before a man twice his age, would set an unacceptable precedent. He just needed a prompt.
“Can’t remember the last time someone ordered one of these.”
“About a minute ago. That would have been me.”
“This last call?” Jim said. “Hit me with a drop shot, girlfriend.”
Dave heard an erratic buzz, the sound of a fly suffocating inside a sealed jar.
“The hell with it,” Bud said. “If I can’t get a real drink, make it a shot of fruit juice. Tomorrow, we’re sticking to whiskey or beer. No more girly drinks.”
“If it’s a girly drink, get me some high heels, brother,” Jim said.
“Bet I’d find some in your closet. See your little lady left without you.”
“Flaming shot is right.” Jim wrapped his arm around Bud.
“Keep your pants on, Jim,” Marianne said.
“Don’t worry, sister,” Jim said. “I’m a lot of things, but I ain’t queer.”
Dave pressed his fingers to his temple and closed his eyes. Bud coughed, and Dave recalled the feverish face of someone nesting in damp sheets. When he opened his eyes, a shattered bottle was lying at his feet, and he was holding his cap in his hand. His bandage dangled from two strips of surgical tape.
“What the fuck happened to your face?” Jim asked.
Marianne looked at the jar of cherries and staggered toward a hedge. Dave touched his cheek and studied his darkened fingertips. He felt his bandage dragging down the side of his face and pressed it back into place, pulled on his cap, and stumbled from the bar.
He walked without direction, catching on branches and trampling flowers until his legs gave out. Damp earth swallowed his knees. A legion of mosquitoes massed around him. He clawed his skin and forced himself to walk again, shying away from bright lights and doubling over whenever pain shot through his head. He stopped before a row of identical buildings. Disoriented by the glare of a sidewalk lamp, he feared their resemblance to so many other buildings in so many other places had conditioned a false sense of familiarity. He pulled a small envelope from his pocket and struggled to read the number on its flap. When he found a door bearing the number, he stood paralyzed until his fear of drawing attention overcame his dread.
He found Helen lying beneath a sheet, her upturned arm exposed to the light filtering through a drawn curtain. Even after he saw her stitches, he panicked, wondering if he’d entered the room of a stranger who might wake and scream. He shut himself in the bathroom, placed a towel at the base of the door, and turned on the light. When he turned to the mirror, he recoiled. Slowly, he leaned over the sink and considered the man standing before him, searching for something familiar, something of himself, in the man’s disfigured features. He removed his cap, peeled away a square of gauze and ran his fingers along sutures pinching discolored skin. Imagining the scars that would forever define the man’s face, he spat at the mirror and watched a streak of saliva slide down the glass. He registered the stunned expression of the man before him. He loathed the man and saw his loathing reflected back.
He dragged his fingers across the glass, knowing he’d always situate his memories on either side of a jagged line. He’d measure every future disappointment and heartbreak against the happiness of a life extinguished in the time it had taken a stranger to break a bottle against his head. He remembered Tremor’s cheeks streaked with soot and saw in the mirror a face deformed by thoughts of murder. He slid down the wall, collapsed on the floor and curled his hands into fists to control their shaking.
In that moment, we truly empathized with him. Time and again, we’d stumbled into the Plantations, drawn by false hopes of regaining Paradise, only to fall prey to despair. We knew only too well what happens to those who stray into places where difference inspires disgust.
SOLITUDE
WHEN HUMANS ENCOUNTER US in kitchens or showers, they sometimes hesitate, if only briefly, to use violence. They study the movements of our antennae, shudder, and remark that we “almost seem to be thinking.” More circumspect (“squeamish,” they say) humans wonder aloud if we’re sentient, as if causing pain weren’t enough to deter them from squashing us with tennis shoes. Often, the last thing we see in this life is a pancake of stale gum caught in a rubber tread. There is no dignity in death.
Humans go to remarkable lengths to rationalize acts of barbarism, usually by claiming that other species lack certain forms of intelligence—the advanced reasoning and self-consciousness that supposedly distinguish human beings from the “lower orders.” They do this through intelligence tests grossly marred by bias and the spurious logic of insecticidal maniacs. In the Journal of Cognition, neurobiologist James Nolan (a consultant for Fountainhead Chemical Solutions!) concluded that “cockroaches demonstrate remarkably limited recall and very little to suggest problem-solving capabilities, or even intelligence beyond that associated with automatons’ unthinking responses to physical stimuli.”
&n
bsp; Complete rot, from stem to stern! Nolan based his opinion on an absurd test that involved placing individual cockroaches in an extensive maze and observing their failed attempts to locate a sugar cube. Nolan’s unfortunate subjects completed these tests in the afternoon, despite the fact that cockroaches, unless routinely disturbed or driven by scarcity, sleep during the day. Mired in anthropocentrism, Nolan failed to account for our circadian rhythms, and more importantly, the compound intelligence enabled by collective behavior. Had we been tested in Nolan’s insidious maze as we naturally act, en masse, we would have scored higher than comparably sleep-deprived humans who hobble themselves by hoarding information and working alone.
Nolan and his ilk would undoubtedly dismiss the results of more carefully designed intelligence tests. There’s too much money to be made in Roach Out! Stooges of the insecticide industry routinely insist that animals lack sentience—the individual self-awareness that generates existential meaning. They have on their side the studies of crackpot scientists who shove dogs in front of mirrors to see if they recognize their own reflections, and then cite any perceived indifference as evidence that animals lack the self-consciousness and individual subjectivity necessary for metaphysical reflection. The mirror test reflects little more than human vanity. Where is the genius in staring at one’s own gob and ruminating over wrinkles? Why should dogs stand in judgment because they’re content with their appearance? Because they’d rather gaze upon others than ogle themselves? Because they lack the self-absorption humans identify as a hallmark of higher intelligence?
Even Descartes, however brilliant a philosopher, was encumbered by a preoccupation with isolated individuals. Faced with the possibility that the physical world is illusory, the product of dreams or hallucinations, he concluded that only his own thoughts could confirm his existence. He might as well have lifted a glass to Narcissus’s reflection when he wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” Humans, so smitten with “I,” seem perfectly willing to exist as brains in vats, steeping away in solitary thoughts. What a bitter brew! What is the basis for empathy if everything outside of one’s mind is subject to doubt and suspicion? How different humans might be if they had antennae, if they could say, “We think, therefore we are.” They’d know and feel so much more. They wouldn’t be so lonely.
The Wonder That Was Ours Page 24
