by Joy Williams
They both studied the small, optimistic, reliable car. A wooden fish, with which Nurse Cormac was known to be well pleased, carved in the Holy Land, dangled from the rearview mirror. It had been rendered in an abstract rather than classical manner. The only other explanation for the artist’s banal vision was that it wasn’t a fish at all.
They turned and walked back along the corridor, the smells of supper, creamed, minced, mashed, and pattied, preceding them.
“If we don’t take our time about it,” Nurse Daisy said, “we can still bathe Hattie.” Hattie used to be a beauty from Philadelphia with a lovely voice, but now, wrinkled, mute, and weighing scarcely more than a boom box, she was here. The body was but a foolish thing, Nurse Daisy liked to assure her, nothing but a counterpart, a substitute, a saboteur, a fraud, and a thief. Unremarkably, her words never soothed. If Nurse Cormac was known for assuring everyone she touched with her cool hands that the Lord Jesus would appear to them in the manner that would enable them to see Him most clearly, in the form they would most recognize, a personalized, monogrammed, shaped-to-order savior for the end of each distinctive life, Nurse Daisy tirelessly projected an unambitious unimaginative Death, who showed up wearily and never on time.
A toilet flushed. Someone howled, “I want to go hoooome.”
“Do you know what position Freddie used to hold? He was an important man, a good man. It’s no secret. Let me tell you. He influenced thousands of lives in this state.”
“What difference does it make?” Alice said.
“So you think that reality is the present, is that what you think?”
This was the most remarkable query Alice had ever heard. She wasn’t going near this one. But she said, “Reality’s no present,” something her poppa might say but hadn’t to her knowledge. She wondered where Nurse Daisy went after work. She imagined her home to be a thorny, unwelcoming wattle.
“Ho ho,” she said. “Very good. Present as in ‘gift.’ Up for assisting me with Hattie?” She believed that Alice was not among her anonymous accusers, the names of which were legion.
In fact, Alice wasn’t one of them, but still the woman wore her out. She blushed and lied. “My friends and I are going to a movie.”
“In my day,” Nurse Daisy said, “when you went to a movie, just as you were settling in and the lights had gone out, a film personality would appear on the screen appealing for funds for some worthy cause promoting human health or longevity. A disease that required eradication—some part of the Devil’s work that needed to be stamped out. Do you believe that disease and death are the Devil’s work?”
“I do not.”
“The Devil is Jesus’ brother. Throw that up to Nurse Cormac sometime, she’ll go through the roof. Do you know anything about electricity?”
Charged particles manifesting themselves as attraction and repulsion, Alice thought mechanically, though she knew that for the nurse this explanation would hardly suffice.
“Negative electricity is as good as positive electricity,” Nurse Daisy instructed. “It’s all electricity.”
Alice thought with discomfort about her oftentimes casual use of electrical products.
“Let’s return to the movie I was speaking about—or rather, as it was in my day, the pitch before the movie. A film star would appear, and the star would appeal to you directly, look right into your eyes. He would acknowledge your presence before him. And he would talk about this or that disease or viral calamity or genetic injustice and his words would be interspersed with the images of all manner of humankind struggling to be well, and he would thank you in advance for opening up your heart. Then the lights would go on, and individuals would pass through the aisles soliciting donations. People would dig into their pockets and purses and give to fight the evil afflicting others. There was something about the lights and the rows upon rows of strangers and the waiting for the movie that would make every person give, not a single one abstaining.”
“I would’ve abstained,” Alice said.
“Your quarter would have paid for a monkey, your dime for a rabbit, your nickel for a mouse to help researchers find cures.”
“What!” Alice yelped. “You didn’t give, did you? You left the movie in protest, didn’t you?”
“You were able to do so much good for a quarter in those days. They made it easier for you than they do today. Today it’s harder to make a person feel guilty. You know the man who blew up the building and killed one hundred sixty people? His sister said he’s not guilty even if he did do it. His sister said, ‘He’s not a monster.’ She remembered happy times together. They played Clue. On their parents’ birthday they would make them breakfast and serve it to them in bed. How did that All-American ritual get started, do you think? It’s always seemed quite unwholesome to me. To serve your parents breakfast in bed on their birthdays? I’d bet anything you never did it.”
They had reached the nurse’s station, where the nurses were chatting about the previous evening, when two residents on the same floor had died within ten minutes.
“That happens so often,” one said. “Months go by, then out of the blue, one gets taken. Then another one.”
“You think It thinks, Well, as long as I’m here,” the other nurse said a little giddily. She was regarding a plate of cookies as though it were all a matter of selection when clearly it was not, the cookies being identical as far as Alice could tell, round and brown with colored sprinkles. They looked desperate, as if baked by someone in despair. Most of the gifts or goods in Green Palms exhibited that aura. When the nurse finally selected one, she had to move others to get at it. She took her first bite just as wizened Wilson Greer II rolled up in his wheelchair.
“Is that the balut, ladies? Share the balut, for Christ’s sweet sakes! No hoarding!” He extended bony fingers toward the plate. Wilson had it in his head that any treat people gathered around was unhatched duck embryos still in the shell, something he’d discovered in the Philippines prior to becoming a guest of the emperor and participating in the Bataan Death March. There wasn’t anyone on the floor who didn’t associate water being sucked down a drain with Wilson’s aural memory of the sound of his best friend and fellow officer Colonel Rodney Wren being bayoneted on the road. There wasn’t anyone who had been around Wilson more than five minutes who didn’t have the catchy ditty
Here’s to the Battling Bastards of Bataan
No poppa, no momma, no Uncle Sam
No aunts, no sisters, no cousins, no nieces
No rifles, no guns or artillery pieces
And nobody gives a damn …
rollicking around their brains, insistent as any show tune.
“You’re not eating that correctly,” the hoary warrior told the nurse. “You have to make a little hole in it, suck out the broth, then peel the shell slowww-ly and eat the yolk and the chick. It’s best before the beak and feathers appear, but sometimes you can’t be choosy, you know?”
People began to drift away. “You call yourselves balut?” Wilson said to the cookies. “You’re no good!”
Alice palmed three cookies off the plate and attempted to swallow them quietly.
“You know they’ve committed psychosurgery on me,” Wilson said. “They buried sensitive electrodes deep within my brain, which allows my brain waves to be sent via a two-way radio to a central computer. Whenever I have an urge they consider inappropriate, the computer sends back a message of its own, inhibiting me. The computer blocks my attitude to just about everything. I don’t know which way is up. I don’t know my ass from my elbow. My inner compass lies dead. My Indian guide has left me.”
Alice looked at him helplessly. A nurse pushed against the back of the wheelchair and said, “C’mon, Wilson, din-din time.”
“Bitch, cunt, whore,” he said. “Filthy phantom animal.”
“Goodness,” the nurse said cheerfully, running the wheelchair casually into the wall. The jarring silenced him.
Alice understood exactly what he meant about losing
his Indian guide. It was the worst thing. They were supposed to stay with you always, but that was only if events went as anticipated, which they seldom did. But an Indian guide would never lead you here unless he was a particularly resentful one. Your nagual—your guardian spirit—wouldn’t lead you here either.
Corvus was coming out of the library, where the well made their attempts to relate to the unwell. The library was designed to look like a tasteful room in a private club. Light fell warmly from beneath orange shades. There were oils of Montana’s mighty Missouri River before the power plants got their hands on it. A few little upper-class knickknacks. Books behind leaded glass. But the leather-looking chairs were actually upholstered in vinyl, so bodily leaks could be wiped off in a jiffy; and beyond the draped windows waited the white ambulances with their silent sirens that never sounded on their passage to the undertaker, that moved softly down the highway, softly, when employed. Alice had seen them go.
“I saw your friend the piano player,” Corvus said. “Is he performing in the rec room, do you think, or is he visiting someone?”
Alice didn’t want to see Sherwin in this place; in fact, she didn’t want to come across him in most places. Someone laid a frail hand on hers. It was a hand belonging to a tiny old man. “What meat mollifies the howl of famished shades?” he said, patting her as though these words were his gift to her. Let her do with them as she wished. Alice had been in Green Palms long enough to know now that when they said “meat,” they didn’t mean “meat.” Even a month ago, if the tiny old man had come up to her and asked, “What meat mollifies the howl of famished shades?” she would’ve recused herself on the basis of her vegetarianism, but no more. Words didn’t even mean their opposite here—they could mean anything. The tiny old man shuffled away.
The rec room was near a long windowless area with a door at either end. Alice looked in the first door and saw nothing, just the fish tank with its glittering grottos. The fish looked as though they didn’t know what they were doing here either.
She walked down the corridor, past the wall covered with children’s drawings. Alice believed that encouraging young children in the arts gave them the false assurance of interpretation. Their artwork was forever being displayed at Green Palms, although the children themselves rarely made an appearance. When they did, they were met with bafflement, even hostility, by the residents. Alice looked in the second door.
“Isn’t that him?” Corvus asked.
Alice saw no resemblance between the shabby man in the windbreaker and Sherwin, whom she had found so unfathomable and thrilling. This man looked … hazy.
“No?” Corvus said. “Well, he’s got to be his double-walker then.”
You couldn’t tell from the double-walker’s expression whether he’d been visiting with someone or was just about to. Usually you could tell.
“Call his name,” Corvus said. “I bet he’ll raise his head and look at you.”
“I will not,” Alice said.
“Call another name and I bet he won’t.”
The windbreaker was a dreary green that Annabel would probably call fern, ugh. He had the demeanor of someone who had to determine every day how to present himself, someone who was holding himself together with the greatest effort, who was exhausted by it and taking a rest from his labors now.
“Absolutely no resemblance,” Alice pronounced.
“How would you describe him, then? Describe the differences.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” Alice said. “It just isn’t him at all.”
“And though to anyone other than yourself the likeness would be quite uncanny, you don’t feel drawn to him or touched by him?”
“No!” This reminded Alice of Nurse Daisy’s “We must see things we do not see and not see things we do see.” It was too much to remember, and she didn’t think it was a desirable thing to do anyway. She didn’t want to do it, and she didn’t want Corvus to do it either. Was this what Corvus was doing? The man in the green windbreaker was no more than a wraith of Sherwin, a visitor here, a stranger. He didn’t acknowledge them. He seemed, as they say, lost in thought.
“He’s got protuberant eyes. That’s supposed to mean a person has a good memory. Does he have a good memory?”
“No, I don’t think so. You mean a past? I don’t think he has any past at all. Let’s go. I don’t do as well in this place as you do.”
“I spent all afternoon with Merry Mendoza,” Corvus said. “Merry Mendoza thought that a fly in the courtyard was her sister Julia come back to life. Not every fly out there was Julia, of course. Merry could differentiate. And could reflect quite unsentimentally on flies in general. It’s easier to kill a fly than save it, she told me, because some flies aren’t nobody. But still, say you do save a fly, she said. For example, it’s inside and it’s struggling to get out but the window’s shut and it’s buzzing against the glass, so you try to catch it between your fingers or, better yet, cup it in your hands because it’s not nice between your fingers, it’s wet, so you cup it in one hand and open the window with the other and release it and the fly’s out there thinking, I want to do something for that person, but then it begins to think, Be realistic, what can you do?”
Alice didn’t think it was healthy to discuss flies all afternoon. She studied the children’s drawings. Apparently it was a traveling exhibition that had originated in the Wildlife Museum and would continue on, after it had been sufficiently absorbed by the geriatrics, to the state university library. Alice realized that the drawings were meant to depict animals, most of which resembled airplanes or cars. A child named Cedric had printed over a rectangle of dirty white, “The skin under a polar bear is black. Polar bears in fack are individuals of color.” Cedric had received an A over a B+ for his efforts, the lesser grade possibly because he had misspelled fact. He had also written a short letter of appreciation to the museum itself. “I really enjoyed all the different animals. I hope you got some more the next time I come.” The Wildlife Museum had been erected almost a decade before, and Alice and her little classmates—all then the same age the fawning Cedric was at present—had been given a free tour. She bitterly recalled her docility, her naïveté, her credulity, her utter lack of judgment. In a too-big dress and red cowgirl boots she stood tittering with her group, awed and irreverent at once. She had felt a giddy self-satisfaction, she remembered, looking at the animals.
They were hollow, she’d learned, all the children had learned, utterly hollow. It was possible to make them lighter and lighter, and they were being made lighter and lighter. A child could hold one aloft. Each year through grade school she went back—Mark your calendar, children!—but grew suspicious. This hollowness wasn’t such a good thing, she decided, this lightness, nor was the darkness behind the drains that had become their eyes. And they were not beautiful, they were not, this way. She felt not duped but a subject of attempted neutralization. They were your other. Guardant. Nagual. But you were being taught not to know them, not to recognize them. They were semblances wretched and unassimilatable.
She also remembered an egg. It was in the museum’s BIRD OF PARADISE display. It was convivially child-sized, and “What you can do” was printed on it above a small creased hole like an infant’s mouth, through which you could drop coins to purchase a hectare of rain forest, or prairie, or marsh and save it from vanishing. Had Alice put her tooth money in? She doubted it.
“Don’t forget my aortic valve replacement,” a frail man called after them as they left. He was exceedingly frail, even for this place. Of course, no one got replacements for anything after they’d checked into Green Palms. The opportunity for replacement was past.
Corvus headed not toward the green van but toward the little spring where they sometimes watched the animals drink at the end of the day. It was a modest font and modestly it lay upon the earth, a suggestion of water really. Along the path to it, Alice saw a baby’s filthy pacifier tipped insouciantly against a flower the name of which she did not know. V
exed, she climbed after the pacifier and kicked it farther. Corvus walked on. She often went without speaking, but this felt different to Alice. Had she disappointed Corvus, perhaps terminally? I don’t do as well in this place as you do. Anyplace. No place. She grabbed the skin between her eyes and twisted. Stupid, stupid, she whispered. She wondered what that boy was thinking now. That had been miles away, and she certainly didn’t expect to come across him anywhere around here, although she did believe their paths would cross again someday. Boys got over things, even a thing like that. By now the experience probably seemed like a total illusion to him. Alice liked to think that she and Corvus and Annabel would do it again. They would bring justice with no mercy, randomly. It had to be random, otherwise it would seem bourgeois. And it would be just boys and men at first, until they’d perfected the craft. Maybe they’d even grab that Cedric. The first time had been messy, no craft at all. If he had been a girl, she’d be claiming for years to whomever would listen that she hadn’t gotten over it, would never get over it. The girl, had she been him, would have nightmares, problems with intimacy, a failure to connect, an inability to express feelings. Boys were better about such things, Alice had to begrudgingly admit.
The day was commencing its delicate dying in the sky. It was still early and therefore skunk time at the spring. The other animals always conceded to the skunk at first, but not forever, just at the beginning; and this, as the skunk comprehended it, deliciously, uniquely once more, was the beginning of the beginning of the night. The girls sat, leaning against the exposed roots of a cottonwood tree. Two mule deer arrived with their preposterous ears. Jackrabbit. Fox. Corvus’s silence felt soothing again, and Alice rocked in it a little. The sun slipped away and still they sat in silence. When it was almost too dark to see, they went down the trail they had only recently ascended.
29
