by Joy Williams
“I’m very conscious of teeth,” she said. “You’ve got scoliosis too, it looks like.”
“I hate talking health,” Sherwin said. “You wanna talk about God?”
“Let me tell you something … how can I put this?”
“That’s always the challenge.”
“God sends you after something that isn’t there.”
Sherwin thought about this.
“I wouldn’t smirk if I were you,” she snapped.
“No, no, I like that. We’re all bums on a scavenger hunt.”
“I hate people who take something someone says, then say it in a different, far less interesting way and pretend it’s better. I would never have said that. We are not all bums on a scavenger hunt.”
“Cigarette?”
“Not yet,” Ginger said.
There really was an odd smell in this room. It sort of soaked into you.
“You think I farted, don’t you?” she said. “Well, I didn’t.”
“I don’t for a moment think you farted,” Sherwin said graciously.
“Carter believes I’m shooting breezers, and that’s not it at all.”
She was big. It was an odd sensation. He was, in this sensation, infinitesimally small.
“Why don’t you go find Carter for me and bring him in here?” Ginger suggested. “Tell him that it’s imperative that he come in here with you for a moment.”
“What reason would I give?” Sherwin asked.
“Oh, just say it’s an emergency. Say someone’s hurt or something.”
“Is someone hurt?” He grinned again, covering his mouth with his hand. He liked her, he didn’t want to annoy her. Here was someone who could understand him completely.
“In a manner of speaking,” Ginger said.
“Something could happen in here. I’m agreeing with you.”
“Carter thinks I’m crude. Of course, he never found me welcoming or desirable before, either.”
“He’s a civilian. He’s blind to greatness. You’re a freak, baby. You’re great.”
“And you’re the famous piano player, aren’t you? The one with the little limp-dick death wish.”
This summation of his situation in no way surprised him.
“You’re the plenipotentiary, baby,” Sherwin said. “You’re my girl.”
“Embrace me,” Ginger said, “and I will be beautiful.”
“Be beautiful and I will embrace you. That’s a poem, isn’t it? ‘We argued for hours’? And ‘it turns out to be life’? Is that the one? My mind’s getting shaky.”
She laughed. “No, no, that’s not the one I’m thinking of. Give me a cigarette.” She was laughing at him. Her teeth were great. Good strong teeth.
He shook a cigarette out of his pack, lit it, and held out his hand to present it to her, but she didn’t move, so he took a step forward, then stumbled over something, losing his balance and pitching against one of the leaning mirrors. He turned, twisting, trying to recover, and fell hard against another one, falling harder than he could imagine possible, into the silvering, and felt it break into him, sliding its cool tongues into his hands and throat and heart. He lay on the floor among the glittering, his blood welling and then skimming down the slim nails of glass. He had almost heard the sound of the glass slipping into him, a sound like his father’s shovels slicing into the ground. His father had called himself a tree surgeon, though in fact he had specialized in just cutting them down, taking them down to the stump. He had saws longer than his arms and called them his Bad Boys. Now look at this Bad Boy, he’d say. He kept his tools beautiful, his shovels so sharp a man could shave with them. No dead daddy, he was still alive, wearing out his fourth wife somewhere in the Texas hill country. Such a nice clean sound he’d first heard; but that was past now, replaced by a sloppier, more distracting one, a squeaking and gurgling. Death by mirrors. Cave, Cave, Dominus videt … and Sherwin was showing himself to be a mess.
43
Alice was walking. No place had yet received her, the world proving to be no solace. She had started out just past dawn while her granny and poppa were still murmuring in bed, having already brewed the coffee and fed Fury his applesauce from his favorite bowl, which had the image of a half-naked body builder on the bottom. The house was full of such odd bits of china, but this was clearly Fury’s favorite, always shown to him empty, prior to being filled, so he could know he wasn’t being deceived.
The heat was pure and light, hollow as a bone. She had been setting out each morning for a day of wandering but returned home to her granny and poppa each night. “No bird so wild but has its quiet nest,” as Sherwin would have said, quoting another. Sherwin had been a big quoter. Alice had seen his pockmarked face and bottle-black hair materialize on certain boulders recently when the light was right or, more likely, wrong. It wasn’t as though he’d died instantly, there had been some lag time. The county coroner, who had arrived with the ambulance, was not of the school that fed the foolish hope that a person could die instantly. Neither conciliatory nor compassionate, he had been educated by Jesuits and as such might as well have been raised by wolves. If you’d invited the coroner to imagine that such lag time served a purpose, perhaps by allowing the soon-to-be-deceased an opportunity to plead for nonforgetfulness and the remembrance of past lives in wherever was coming next, he would’ve laughed in your face. He was a regular on a local talk-show channel, and Alice’s granny had described his laugh as infectious.
That elephant had died too, the same evening, the one who painted watercolors. Her keepers had shipped her to Phoenix and bred her there, and her unborn had slipped out of her womb into her abdomen, rupturing the uterine wall. They hadn’t let her paint during pregnancy because they wanted her to focus on raising a calf, they’d denied her paints, brushes, the artist’s life. Ruby was the name her managers had given her. And Ruby had spent her last hours all opened up on a pile of mattresses and inner tubes. She hadn’t liked Phoenix anyway. Who would? Still, she’d had many mourners there. Cheap bouquets piled high against the zoo’s gates. Plush toy elephants. Even a couple of old pianos, “Forgive us” painted on the keys. Candy, conversely, had not been pregnant at all, except hysterically. A combination of hypnotism and pharmaceutical mixing had untethered the imaginary child from her bitter and uncharismatic grasp.
Alice loped through washes and down the cracked beds of scalped rivers; she trotted through barren swales, past yellow earthmoving machines big as stables. Somewhere there was a hidden world, she hoped, closed to observation and obliteration. Closed to memory. Safe.
Annabel had written to her on one of those virtually weightless folds of blue paper where the letter was not enclosed but was the envelope itself. Annabel wrote that she’d had a facial in Paris, and the girl had discovered an imbedded, almost colorless blackhead on her cheek and she couldn’t get it out and couldn’t get it out and Annabel was half frantic with worry and the girl was just about to give up when she got it. Then she’d shouted, “Go, team!” and both of them wept with relief. “Go, team!” the French girl had said. Annabel had found herself quite adept at learning French, but what was the point if the French were learning dumb American phrases as fervently as they could? Annabel had just finished The Stranger in the original.
“Do you know how it begins, Alice?” she wrote. “ ‘Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’ I think there’s a lot more to those first two sentences than most people think. At first I thought I couldn’t go on, but then I whizzed right through it, the whole book. Daddy’s very happy here, and so is Donald, who adores him, hangs on his every word, if you can believe it. He’s forgotten all about Siddhartha. Daddy’s going to buy Donald a vineyard, just a small one. Happiness is the most important thing there is. I’ve had two liaisons already and one affaire de cœur.…”
She had asked about Alice’s new tooth but had not inquired after Corvus. There was more, written in the margins, but Alice didn’t read it. She preferred not finis
hing something to having it end on its own terms.
She perched on a shelf of shale near a pack rat’s impressive mound of cholla joints and stared down at Mr. V.’s vacated house. Mr. V. had practically teleported Annabel and Donald out of there after Sherwin’s accident. “Sliced to ribbons” was the accepted phrase. By slicing himself to ribbons, Sherwin seemed to have provided a conduit of escape for the others, as though he’d been sacrificed or something. Still, it had worked out well enough. He wasn’t living anyway, not really, and he had been tiresomely, peevishly aware of this for some time. But now that he was gone, he seemed more a strange thought she’d had than anything. He’d be the first to be amused by this, the first and maybe only. She could hear him say, Why, Alice, you are empathetic.
The house was empty, the pool drained. Everything had been auctioned off to benefit Mr. V.’s bill at the Hilton. He’d given the Corvette to the bartender, the piano to the suite’s maid. Peeled of familiarity, the house looked a blind and formless thing. A realtor’s sign glinted in the sun. Swaying on two little hooks beneath it was a cylinder that was supposed to provide information sheets, but there was nothing in it. Alice had looked. Now, from a distance, she gazed down at the house. Even the Indian was gone, and the chair he’d been placed in. At that very moment, some states and days removed from and unrealized by Alice, actual Indians were playing buffalo. They were making an attempt to dance the buffalo back into being—sticks shoved through their shoulder blades, bleeding, atoning, serving, pretending to be. A dance that hadn’t been danced in a hundred years was now being rebroadcast. “Alicekins would enjoy this, wouldn’t she?” her poppa was saying.
The emergency vehicles had certainly made a mess of the landscaping out here. On further reflection, Alice concluded it was cactus thieves who had struck. A large columnar cereus was just gone, off to a new decorating role in Palm Springs. Sophisticated burglars taking advantage of an ascendant retro surge had hit the place hard. There were holes everywhere.
Nothing stirred. Life was not obvious. The pack rat’s spiny pile was festooned here and there with bottle caps and the blue plastic rings that had once ensured the purity of jugged water. The rat had to bear the burden of its incorrect name, for it was not genus Rattus at all although often slandered as such. Shy and misunderstood as it was, it must have been immensely pleased with the construction, which even included a tube of lipstick, Mrs. V.’s lipstick so recently enshrined by Annabel. Mrs. V. was stubborn—still being represented in this practically nowhere by this tube she had known, golden without, and within horribly crimson and waxily collapsed. Alice hoped Mr. V. had gone far enough away for happiness. And she hoped he wasn’t eating veal over there, though this was unlikely, given the penchant of the French. They even ate horses. She should send him a little note, something fun, not too didactic: A HEART ATTACK IS GOD’S REVENGE FOR EATING HIS LITTLE FRIENDS. She didn’t want to be informed that he’d had a heart attack, of course.
I shouldn’t come out here after today, she thought. She felt a certain misalignment regarding herself and her life. A misalignment could make a big difference.
She had gone to Green Palms on the first of the days, and Nurse Daisy had appeared at the door.
“You look like you’ve got the flu,” she said. “We can’t expose our residents to random bugs that might carry them away sooner rather than later.”
“I don’t have the flu,” Alice said.
“People deny, they conceal, they prevaricate. I’ve heard it all.”
Inside, they were tossing a beach ball around a circle. Singing silly love songs. Getting their diapers changed.
“You’ve got something,” Nurse Daisy said, “and it’s not acceptable here. Go away, now. Shoo. Shoo!”
“I’m looking for Corvus.”
“You always are. That’s not her name anymore. She received a different name. What did you call your first little pets? Tyger? Domino? Don’t you wish you were a little kid again?”
“Not really,” Alice said.
“Your mind developing. You’d be two, then four. What a difference. People who cared would be thrilled at your progress. Those false-belief tests. You’d bring up your scores, eventually.”
“What’s a false-belief test?”
“Sally puts a chocolate in a box, then leaves the room. June comes in, takes the chocolate out of the box, puts it in a basket. Sally comes back. Where will Sally look for her chocolate? A two-year-old, a three-year-old will point at the basket, because that’s where the chocolate is, but you won’t. You’ll be four. You’ll point at the box. Theory of mind. Shows you’re capable of simultaneously conceiving of and appreciating two alternative and contradictory models of reality. And it just gets better and better for a time when you’re a little kid. The capacity to change nervous pathways—that is, to learn—seems unlimited. But then the changing slows, even stops. And all that’s left is to get pig sick of things.”
They were playing with their fruit cups on trays locked in place, the syrup too thick for their old throats. They were stroking the wheels of their chairs.
Alice could see them, dimly.
“You never long to be a little child again? Because look at you now, an odd one, one from whom love and participation are not particularly desired.”
“You can’t hold Corvus in here,” Alice had said. “There are rules.”
Nurse Daisy’s jaw dropped. Rules, she mouthed. Alice almost turned to look behind her, for it seemed that the nurse was projecting to a distant, disbelieving audience.
“You must stop trying to impose yourself on that girl,” Nurse Daisy said. “ ‘Sit in your cell, and your cell will tell you everything.’ That’s something she’s learned and you never will.”
Inside, their names were posited in ink upon the collars of their clothes. Someone, something, was combing their old hair.
“This is not a nunnery,” Alice said.
“It’s a sexless place of contemplation. Don’t pick nits.”
“Corvus doesn’t want to be in a nunnery.”
“You’ll never know. You are not her! Maybe you wouldn’t score that nicely on the false-belief test. Maybe you’d keep going for that basket, much to everyone’s disappointment.”
Alice frowned. “Please,” she said, “I want to see Corvus.”
“Don’t demean yourself with pleading,” Nurse Daisy snapped. “Why do you always have to look at everything twice in order to see it? The short prayer penetrates Heaven, they say, but any fool can see this isn’t Heaven here. Your friend’s disappointed you. Think of it that way if it will make you feel better.”
“I’m a volunteer,” Alice said. “I can come inside.” Nurse Daisy firmly shut and locked the door.
Vexed, Alice had begun to walk, then run the four miles to the Wildlife Museum, with the vague intent of making a ruckus, of unroutine sabotage. But how could one sabotage death all doubled back upon itself, presenting itself so breathlessly intact? Still, she thought she’d knock some things over, rail at the paying customers, make them reflect on the transaction they were engaged in.
Then she had arrived, baffled, at the immense new wall encircling the place, to which small lettered signs in what looked to be a child’s hand were attached at inconsistent intervals.
CLOSED FOR RECONSIDERATION
The cement smelled fresh. There was a smoldering smell, too. Maybe everything back there was getting an air burial. No, that was something different; pyres were not involved. With an air burial something had to come and get you. Something wild. There was no telling what. But you had to be carrion for air burial to be successful. And these objects weren’t even dead. Rather, they had died but weren’t dead now. It was like a church, this museum, a death dome full of fabrication and comfort and instruction and paradox. She hated it. She threw stones over the wall. Was there a vast pit back there then, tarred and lavender, offering final decease at last? She threw more stones. A limousine moved slowly past on the road above her, paused, and then pro
ceeded on.
Stumpp and Pickless, driving with complacent aimlessness in the blueblack limousine, were each chewing on a piece of licorice. The child was in the front, and in the back there was something breathing in a box. A sweetish smell emanated. There was always something heaving in the rear in their rides together, depleted, partial, clinging to life, trying to flutter or crawl, still breathing. Something dumb, bewildered, in a weary-unto-death panic, covered in leather jackets or silken scarves, ringed with spilt dishes of water, pans of seed and crumbs. Emily liked driving purposelessly around with her charges; the motion and the little lights inside that looked like stars served to occupy their thoughts, she believed. She had put away the tea things and was gnawing on the licorice for Stumpp’s sake. Stumpp had introduced her to it, both the red and the black. Licorice was very much an acquired taste, she suspected, pretty much like everything that lay ahead.
“Chucking rocks,” Emily noted. A little thrill rose up in her, then subsided. She maintained a soft spot for irrational behavior. She turned to Stumpp and said somewhat fatuously, “I’m glad I’m not her.” She was shocked she’d said such a thing, though it was neither true nor untrue. Lies, on the other hand, were more permissible, being nothing more than secrets.
“How could you be her?” Stumpp had finished his licorice. There was a last gummy node behind his molar. He left it there for the time being. Funny stuff, licorice. The root of the plant had been found packed in tombs in Egyptian lands. Had meant something once. Reduced to a confection now. The past was replete with lost guides.
“You can become something you’re not,” Emily said. She sensed, then, a whispering, a plunge and settle in the box of spilt offerings. She did not turn her head to confirm that for yet another, the intriguing passage had been breached.
Stumpp maneuvered the long car with incremental turnings of the wheel. Half-pint sutra, little Pickless. Unreaped whirlwind. The sun shone like oil upon the limousine’s hood, which had been waxed to the shine of water. A futuristic ark with two unmateable souls within. As it should be. Into the future. Shouldn’t even have a name, the future. Thing had died back there, whatever it was, whatever labors it had undertaken as a pup. Its time transpired. Knew she’d heard it go, little adept. Best Homo sap can do is perceive the penumbral. Yet not enough the penumbral. Not good enough for Pickless. Nothing too good for Pickless. Grateful he could see that so clearly. Scales all fallen away. For this was a rare confluence. Confluence to end all confluences, Stumpp and Pickless. Would never want materially, he’d make sure of that. All means must be put at her disposal. The rest up to her. For she was going to inherit the world. The world once more …
