by Joy Williams
You have been deemed a candidate by Physician/Family/Staff for the Terminally Ill Program, and therefore the following comforts and electives will be denied to you beginning at 3 a.m. this day and extending into any remaining future. Television, oxygen, antibiotics, cookies, batteries, cooling waters, green pastures, and heretofore merciful acts of providence whether deserved or undeserved. Any peaceful dark that comports itself as den, lair, sanctuary, or refuge. Freedom from fear. Any acts of grace except those that passeth understanding. Podiatric care. Dental care. Donuts with jelly. Eyeglasses. Excursions. Any exercises to discourage muscle atrophy. That stupid little hard ball that we encouraged and encouraged and encouraged you to squeeze and you never would will be taken away. All wishing, hoping, and desiring. Ice in a cup to crunch. Key chains. For the ladies, hats. Remaining to you is any comfort available from dreams. We do not suggest attempting to dream of starting over. Do not dream of the first kiss or the one who will have been the love of your life. Avoid specifics in terms of the beauty of lightning, meadows, eyes, the touch of certain hands. Avoid those old constructions—the nesting box made of cedar, the bookcase mortised with pegs, the child’s swing so easily made at the time. We suggest, rather, of dreaming of smaller balls within larger ones, of blue air liquid, of small shining clouds, of rhizomes. Dream of rhizomes if you can.
14
Alice wanted very much to harass, torture, and, with any luck at all, destroy John Crimmins, but she had to find him first for he had disappeared immediately after the fire. There were already new tenants in the house he’d rented, a blameless couple with a pet peahen named Attila. The blameless couple annoyed Alice, ignorant as they were of John Crimmins’s whereabouts, unknowing of Tommy or his end, blithely incurious about the charred plot of land to the south. Should not sickening cruelty leave its impressions upon the surroundings? Should not a repulsive act taint the very air?
“I understand why you burned your house down,” she said to Corvus. They were sitting in the Airstream, which they had towed into Alice’s side yard. “It’s like the Navajos used to burn their hogans down if someone died in it, isn’t that so? Then the Anglos taught them to stop doing this, so if they had a sick baby, say, who just got sicker and sicker? They’d put it outside the house so they wouldn’t have to burn it down when the baby died.” The telling of this story had held more promise in its inception; it had been meant actually to comfort and confirm. But as with so many of Alice’s utterances, it had veered from the confirm-and-comfort path.
“I think you did the right thing, Corvus, that’s all I meant,” Alice said. “I think you always do.”
Corvus said nothing, and Alice began talking again about John Crimmins, how they would go about finding him. Alice knew there were methods by which an appealing, appropriate-looking person could get any information desired on anyone else, and she vowed to transform herself into such a person, if necessary, to see that John Crimmins met his punishment.
“I’d like to shake those people up,” she said. “How can they not know anything?”
The place had been broom swept, the blameless couple said, which was all that real estate law required. They aspired to become real estate agents themselves someday. The place had actually been quite clean when they took occupancy.
“I want to find him and drive him crazy,” Alice said.
“You’re driving me crazy,” Corvus said.
“Well, that would be … you’d be the wrong person.” I will never let you be crazy, Alice thought. She felt the stronger of the two for an instant and was frightened. But the instant passed, both the feeling stronger and the fear of it.
Corvus could not assimilate his act into her life, so she placed him outside the way she thought about her life. Doing this was going to make her sick, Alice believed, though the idea that things that happened to you weren’t your life was sort of interesting. Corvus didn’t believe John Crimmins’s power was legitimate. She never talked about him, never accompanied Alice in her musings as to what he had done before and what he would do next.
“A person like him,” Alice said, “just can’t slip back into civilized society.”
“Why not?” Corvus said.
“He’ll feel remorse eventually and jump off a building,” Alice said hopefully.
“No, he won’t.”
“Tommy’ll come back to haunt him,” Alice said, though she didn’t really believe this. Tommy, hung, then burned to the bone, would, instead, be racing after Corvus’s mother, never arriving at her side forever, released too late by the cruel facilitator, John Crimmins.
15
Ginger’s manifestation startled Carter for it was in the sober hour, that practically canonical hour before the first cocktail of the evening.
“Darling!” he said. “Isn’t there anything to do there?”
“No,” she said, “nothing to do. Working, sexing, resting, thinking—you can’t do any of it.”
Sexing? Carter thought. That was so depressing.
“Go ahead,” she said impatiently, “make your drink.”
He took special care with this one.
“How does it taste?”
“It doesn’t taste all that good, actually. Ginger, you’re making me nervous.”
“Do you remember how you ruined our honeymoon, Carter?”
Like pushing a rope, he thought. No, no, that had been later. “So,” he said, “how are you?” He took another swallow.
“I feel as though I’ve taxied away from the gate but haven’t taken off yet. There’s this unconscionable delay.”
“Oh my,” Carter said. “We both know what that feels like. That flight to London—”
“I think it may be something you’re doing.”
“Me?” Carter said. “But I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary, darling. Everything is very everydayish here.”
She rubbed her bare arms as though chilled. The gesture gave Carter goose bumps. “You believe I’m preventing you from, ah, ‘taking off’?”
“You were always suppressing me, Carter, always holding me back.”
“You have to stop thinking about me, Ginger. You have to take the next step.” He looked at his ice cubes. There wasn’t anything around them.
“Let’s not argue again tonight, Carter,” Ginger said. “Let’s be friends. I’d like to give you something, a little gift.”
This discomposed him utterly.
“It’s not like that, Carter. Where would I get a gift? Use your head! It’s advice, some advice. When we were together there was always this, this … haunting insufficiency.”
“That’s not advice, Ginger,” he ventured to say.
“I’m not through!” she snarled. “Won’t you let me finish a sentence!”
How had he summoned her here, how, how? She was right. He must be doing something. What innocent thought or haphazard reflection was bringing her back so vividly all the time? She was his personal maenad. Maybe he was listening to too much opera. A frenzied woman who coupled marriage with carnage in a twisted rite was practically a definition of opera. This was Ginger to a T.
“You can’t make me suffer anymore, Ginger.”
“Ha,” she said.
At least they weren’t trapped in a car together, hurtling down some highway. He gave the ice cubes some more whiskey.
“My advice is …” She paused. “Imagine renewing our vows, Carter, you and I. People do it all the time, all sorts of people. And what do they do before they renew their vows? They remember the happy times. The wonderful things. The bright, not the black. I am your wife and spiritual partner. I want you to come to the threshold again. Remember when we were on the threshold of marriage and all you knew was love and hope?”
He silently resisted this interpretation of his complex feelings at that time.
“I want you to see me in that light again,” she said. “You’re not seeing me in the right light. And that’s why I’m unable to ‘take off,’ as you so crassly put it.”
/> He protested this mutely.
“What’s the matter with you?” she snapped. “You know, I almost went into intensive care that night. I debated whether to go into intensive care on the ride in the ambulance, and then I thought about all the unpleasantness that would entail and decided against it. I never thought you were going to carry on like this, Carter. I should’ve chosen intensive care. You would’ve had your hands full then, all right.”
“You could decide?” Carter said. “It really was up to you?”
“You make me regret everything I do.”
She was truly expert at this, Carter thought.
“That was a big choice I made, and now you’re making me question it.”
No, he couldn’t possibly assure her that she had done the right thing. He was trapped. “I wish you’d give me the chance to miss you,” he said tentatively. “I think you’d be pleased.”
“How would you do that?” she demanded. “I’ll tell you how. You’d remember happy times, or you’d anticipate happy times and wish I were there to share them with you. You’re putting the cart before the horse. No, I think I’ll keep coming back until this thing is resolved.” She was scratching her neck in that nervous way she had. It really was the cocktail hour now, well into it. “Do you have any of those little snacks I like, those spicy snacks?”
He tried to behave as though he did but just couldn’t lay his hands on them. They’d always given him heartburn, he hated them.
“Doesn’t Donald like them?” she said venomously. “What’s he doing tonight, out hand-pollinating something?”
The thought of Donald fluffed Carter up a bit. “Donald—” he began.
“Oh, I don’t want to talk about him,” Ginger said. “I want to talk about me, about us, Carter, about the potential we still have together.”
“There’s no need to be jealous of Donald, darling,” Carter said. “He’s a caring and serious boy, a student of Buddhism. I actually think he could help you, Ginger.”
“Slow fat white dudes studying Buddhism make me sick.”
“Donald isn’t fat,” Carter protested. Ginger had always been overly conscious of weight.
“I can just hear him. ‘It’s only death, Ginger. Everything is fine.’ I wish people like that would shut up. Does he say, ‘Thank you, Illusion,’ every time he manages to overcome some piddling obstacle in his silly life? ‘Thank you, Illusion, thank you …’ ” she minced.
Had she been eavesdropping on Donald? Or were Buddhists—WASP Buddhists, in any case—wandering around in the unthere there just as unfulfilled as Ginger?
“You’ve always hated women, Carter. You showed it in so many little ways. You never used the ellipsoidal or elliptical form in your work, not once. It was so obvious, the efforts you made not to employ the oval form. You don’t even like horse racing. Most men, real men, like horse racing, but not you. The shape of the track was too feminine for you, too frightening.”
“Wagering has never appealed to me, darling. I have never wagered. Gambling is a disease.” Horse racing actually did repell him—those thousands of pounds of caroming flesh, bodies all treated with Lasix to keep the blood circulating inside where it belonged. Didn’t want that blood flying around the track on its own.
“A disease! Like drinking, you mean? Like infertility? You’re such a sap.”
“Infertility?” Carter said. “I didn’t know that was a disease.”
“They’re fighting to make infertility a disease so insurance companies will have to pick up the tab.”
Pick up the tab? Ginger’s language was beginning to fall off. Why was she keeping abreast of current trends, anyway? It didn’t seem necessary.
“The things you people fight for,” she sneered.
She was sounding more and more reactionary, Carter thought. Though one couldn’t expect the dead to be big fans of progress. He wasn’t fighting for anything, certainly not disease, if that’s what she was accusing him of. If anything he was fighting to stay awake, even though he’d scarcely finished his second drink. Staying awake was Donald’s most recent recommendation—arrived at, of course, by way of the Buddha. According to Donald, when some fellow inquired as to how in the dickens men were supposed to conduct themselves with women, the Buddha had first replied, “Don’t see them.” Fine, fine, in Carter’s present predicament, that should’ve been more than sufficient; but then the fellow had persisted, good for him, and said, “But if we do see them, what are we to do?” and the Buddha had answered, “Stay awake.”
Carter widened his eyes, and Ginger became, if anything, bigger.
“You should know something,” she said. “Annabel is not your child. She’s Charge Peabody’s daughter.”
“Oh stop it, Ginger.” Charge Peabody was a stellar twit, a real tosspot. Ambassador to three countries. He’d drunk himself right into the grave.
“Have him exhumed. DNA testing will prove it.”
“I’m not exhuming him, Ginger.”
“Legally his child. She could make a little money off his estate. Dig him up! I should think you’d want to get this straightened out.”
Carter darkened his drink. A nice brunette drink. She would never call it a night now, he knew. For her the night was just beginning. There was morning knowledge and evening knowledge—there always had been—and he was going to get an earful.
16
Alice roamed the mountain trails in the coolness of early morning. The wilderness was less than an hour’s walk away, which wasn’t right, of course, but that’s the way the world was now, available. She trotted along the trails, her eyes picking up bones. Her eyes were good at bones: lizard jaw, webby coyote skull, the winged eye sockets of the jackrabbit, tiny mice feet encased in owl droppings. She never moved them from their resting spots, she never collected. There was a hummingbird impaled on a barrel cactus, flung there by a momentary wind, a dust devil. Above the pierced and iridescent body, a bright yellow flower bloomed. That’s what Alice liked about the desert, its constant, relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once. She wished she could interest Sherwin in it, but he professed a distaste for nature, however peculiar its forms. She was running this morning to burn off some energy, so that when she saw him in his own apartment—he had actually invited her there, he had actually said cumawn over if you wanna—she’d be a little worn out and not say immature things or much at all.
Alice heard a motorbike’s whine and saw dust rising. Bikes were banned because they stressed the bighorns, though some people argued that there were no bighorns left. They had seen them once but not for a while. Alice had never seen one. The bike was tossing itself down the mountain in brief airborne flights. The bike was yellow and the biker wore black and they looked hinged together, the man and the machine. Waggling and snapping, the thing bore down. She stepped off the path into an outcropping of broken rock and picked up the first large stone she could hold in one hand, for she was not going to let him pass without protest.
Sherwin lived above a statuary shop. The neighborhood was a little odd; it looked as though it catered to particular whims, but it was quiet now and empty, all those whims apparently catching their breath.
“So here it is, now you see it,” Sherwin said. “The room of monstrous legend. You want something to eat?”
“Where shall I sit?” Alice said. “Is it all right if I sit on the bed?”
“Sure,” he said. “So how are you?”
“What are all those statues down there?” There was a dachshund one foot high and five feet long. Maybe her granny and poppa would like it. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t. It might seem a bit cemeterian.
“Did you see Neit, the one with the veil? I like her. A friend of mine’s got a deposit on her, though. Anything with a veil, he goes for.”
“Neit?”
“Greatest of the Egyptian goddesses. She has written on her ‘I am everything which has been, is, and will be and no mortal has yet lifted my v
eil.’ Or words to that effect.”
“I didn’t see her,” Alice admitted. She was embarrassed that she’d been drawn to such a carefree object as the dachshund.
“I gotta have something to eat,” he said, and started frying bacon in a pan. The room soon filled with smoke and smell.
“That food had a face,” Alice said.
He built two ghastly sandwiches and quickly ate them.
“My grandmother pours the grease in an empty coffee can,” Alice said. “I don’t think you’re supposed to pour it down the sink.”
“Yeah?” Sherwin said. “Would you like a piece of pie?”
“When you’re here, are you always eating?” Alice asked. “I usually eat a lot too.”
He put a white pie box beside her on the bed. The pie was half gone; it resembled lemon meringue. He sawed off a piece for himself with a spoon and ate it walking around.
“Nothing even working on a nostalgic plane out there,” he said pointing out at the street. “If you look out a window and can’t even grub a little nostalgia out of the busy view, you’ve hit bottom.”
Alice looked at him happily.
“Your friend Corvus,” he said, “I think I have her figured out. She’s living in order to disappear. Nietzsche said that. Are you going to remember that?”
“No.” Alice didn’t want to think about Corvus now.
He laughed. “I think your friend is capable of something drastic.”
“I’m capable of something drastic too.”
“You want to do something, all right. You want to be a seminal figure. But what do you want to do right now? You wanna go out and get something to eat?”
“Can’t we just stay here?”
“You want a glass of water or something?”
“Would it be a perfect glass of water?” Alice asked slyly.
“Water is so mysterious, I love it. It can’t get wet. It’s exempt because that’s what it is. I just love that about water. You can’t think like that for too long, though; it’s like one of those alive thoughts. You think, Agghhh, it’s alive.”
