The Quick & the Dead

~ ~ ~

GOOD MORNING MR./MS.

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 veil.’ 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.”

Alice imagined being by herself and then a man who looked like him arriving. They would lick each other’s hands, they would bury their faces in each other’s hair.

“If I was a gay boy your age, same eyes, same mouth, same old raunch, you wouldn’t be interested,” he said. “When I was sixteen, I wanted to be known for the lowness of my morals and the highness of my mind. I’ve been meaning to ask, do you have the same dreams as your mother?”

“No!”

“I’ve heard that happens. Girls and their mothers.”

Alice’s mouth began to hurt again, taking her out of his room and her happiness. She ran her tongue over the loose tooth. It seemed very loose. Throwing a rock at the man on the motorbike had not been a gesture without consequences. He had skidded around and back toward her, taken his helmet off so she could get a good look at his stupid face, and walloped her with it. She had moved back so it hadn’t connected the way he intended, but the visor had still clipped her. Sherwin probably thought she’d bruised her mouth herself, for a more interesting look. That’s what she would’ve thought. She used to do that when she was younger. Take a piece of skin beneath her eyes, say, and give it a good twist so she’d look intriguing. But she hadn’t done that for years.

He sat down beside her on the bed. She was wearing jeans and a baby blue T-shirt that said “Thank you for not breeding.” She stopped tonguing her tooth.

“I love you,” she said cautiously.

“I love you too.”

This disappointed her.

“Words are just noise, Alice,” he assured her. “Language is just making noise.” He nibbled at the side of her face, making tiny grunts of pleasure.

The tooth had freed itself. She held her hand to her mouth as discreetly as possible and maneuvered the tooth into it. She swallowed blood, murmuring. He drew back and saw specks of frothy blood on her T-shirt.

“I lost my tooth.” She opened her hand. The large, white tooth seemed almost voodooesque. She didn’t like looking at it and wondered how dentists made it through the day.

“You’re still losing your teeth?” Sherwin asked. “You’re younger than I thought.” He was, however, nonplussed. He had a greedy body and a wayward mind, but this was slightly more than he could handle this afternoon. He watched her go into his bathroom, cupping the tooth in her hand, her jeans loose over her flat little ass. He heard water running into the sink, then it stopped and he heard her taking an admirable piss.

When she came out, he said, “You piss like a horse, Alice. It sounds great.”

“Oh, thanks,” Alice said distractedly. She had wrapped the tooth in a piece of toilet paper and put it in her pocket. She had folded another piece of paper into the oozing socket. She supposed she should go home. Maybe when she had some money she’d get a gold replacement with an emblem on it, maybe a scorpion, but that’s what nose rings did, she didn’t want to be considered a nose ring. Every time she thought of something, it seemed it had already been a trend for hundreds if not thousands of people for some time. What if there weren’t any new thoughts? You drifted around until you bumped into something that had been there all the while, then you attached yourself to it because you had to attach yourself to something. A stupid tooth had fallen out and she felt outworn, undone, but maybe that’s how a tooth falling out was supposed to make you feel, maybe that’s just the way a tooth falling out operated.

“You’ve got an awful lot of prescription drugs in there from veterinarians,” she noted.

“I’m a werewolf,” Sherwin said. “Which explains the tuxedos. But mostly it’s that I don’t know any writing doctors. I don’t mean to appear curious, Alice, I don’t want you to think the less of me, but why are your teeth falling out?”

She considered her strategy. She wouldn’t tell him. She would be mysterious, alluring. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Were you in an accident?”

Her actions would be ravishing and unfathomable.

“Did someone hit you?”

She told him everything. It no longer seemed like an experience she’d had.

“Don’t pick a cause, Alice, they’re all so inconvenient. Differences of opinion have been known to occur.”

“The mountain is off-limits to motorized vehicles. It’s a rule.”

“He could’ve had a gun.”

“Oh, he did. He waved it around.” He’d told her that he could rape her as well but he wouldn’t, she was too ugly. “You’re not too ugly!” Annabel would protest when told and then appear perplexed.

“Don’t engage yourself,” Sherwin said. “That’s the key to everything. Don’t traffic in social responsibility.”

“I don’t want to be socially responsible at all,” Alice said. She wanted him to be dark, the things he said to be dark. She didn’t want advice or for him ever to be helpful.

“Look, honey, if you believe in the utter value of the individual, you’ve got to devalue the rest of the world.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, it’s necessary. It just follows.”

“It hurts to talk,” Alice said.

He crushed some ice and wrapped it in a rag. “That underwear is perfectly clean, I assure you,” he said.

“How do I look?” Alice asked. “Do I look okay?”

“One seeks in vain among debased superlatives.” He pressed the ice against her jaw, then shrugged. “It’s too late for this. Do you feel nostalgic yet?”

Through the cold she could smell nicotine on his stained fingertips.

“That guy had a job before you environmentalists took it away. Now he has nothing to do but ride his bike, his only treasure, then go home at night to terrorize his children and beat his wife. Spousal abuse is directly linked to environmental regulation. It can be stamped out only by stamping out nature — not human nature, the other one. That alone will provide jobs and stop the breakdown of the American family.”

Alice reluctantly dragged her tongue from the tantalizing vacancy. “Can you see it when I smile?”

“You should forgive him, for starters. Forgiveness is cool.”

“Forgiveness is optional,” Alice said. “Sometimes it’s not appropriate at all.”

“Forgiveness is complicated, you’d like it.”

“I’m not a complicated person.” It was as though he were talking about Corvus again.

“You ever watch that television show, Ricky and Romulus? Every Tuesday five to five-thirty? One’s a paraplegic black guy, and the other’s the white guy who crippled him in a robbery. Black guy says, ‘I have forgiven you, I am in the living process of forgiving you, I want to help you get employment, an apartment, a high school diploma, I want to help you get clean, I want to pay off your credit card debts.’ Romulus is a good guy. Can only move his lips and eyebrows. Looks like a big gray melon sitting in a chair. Ricky, on the other hand, is a skinny, jittery, hyped-up, drug-addled flamboyance cursing and bawling ‘Lemme alone, I’ve served my time, I’ve paid my debt to society, I don’t want your skanky forgiveness, get off my ass, I wish you were dead, man.’ They go at each other for fifteen minutes and then viewers call in with supporting arguments. It’s a remarkable program.”

“How can it be on every Tuesday?”

“They’ve been on for over a year now. The quality of mercy is an inexhaustible subject.”

Alice thought that their first time alone together had gone well. Well, fairly well. When she got back home she asked her granny and poppa about Ricky and Romulus. Did it exist? She stood in darkness just around the corner from them, worrying about the havoc her tooth would wreak on their small savings.

“I don’t watch that,” her granny said. “It’s like those wrestling programs. There’s something insincere about it. If we’re free Tuesday five to five-thirty,” her granny said, “we’re usually tuned into Women Betrayed by Companion Animals. Some of those stories can make your hair stand on end.”

No lights were shining in the Airstream. Alice slipped into her room, which she thought of as the kind of room where somebody who someday would do something cataclysmic would spend her formative years. The only decoration was the picture of the woman and the octopus. Alice loved this picture and had studied its every nuance. She undressed, and as she was pulling her T-shirt over her head, the tooth fell to the floor. She picked it up and almost put it beneath her pillow. When she had been a little kid, of course, teeth had dutifully turned into cold hard cash, in one of the perverse and jolly customs perpetrated on little kids. A classic capitalistic consumer ploy, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy. The idea that there was some spirit out there who paid for teeth — what was it constructing anyway? What was its problem?

She got into bed and waited for sleep. She liked waiting for sleep. It wasn’t like waiting at all.

She reflected on the octopus, as she did most nights, so intelligent and shy but extending itself, as it were, moving out of its solitary nature, unoctopuslike, impossibly in love. She had always related more to the octopus than the woman, although the woman had to be fairly interesting to find herself in this situation. An octopus could brood and plan for the future, that was known, everybody knew that, and it was undoubtedly brooding and planning at the very moment depicted, while the woman looked as though she had given up. The octopus, so bright and solitary and weird, was giving the situation its full attention, whereas the woman knew that it was suffocating and being poisoned by its bloodstream just by being in the room with her, and that brooding and planning wouldn’t help at all. The difference in attitude was what made the situation tragic.

17

Corvus chose to volunteer once a week at the nursing home, Green Palms, and the first Thursday Alice and Annabel went too. They were accepted and acknowledged much like the dogs, Tiffany and Helen, who made their rounds on Fridays.

A green van transporting a few gloomy cleaning ladies and a manic, moonfaced physical therapist picked them up and took them out into the foothills, where Green Palms was concealed in a magnificent riparian area. Nothing was supposed to be built here, but the developers had won approval by making the nursing home the cornerstone of their resort package. Green Palms was state-of-the-art End of the Trail. In an act of conceptual brilliance, it was tastefully concealed from the resort’s supper clubs, ballrooms, pools, gymnasiums, and stables; a glimpse of it could be afforded from the golf course, but from the more expensive suites it was invisible, and from a distance it could not be seen at all. The van wound its way slowly up narrow roads and through a number of guardhouse gates, which opened in recognition of a decal on the windshield.

“I wish we lived in a gated community,” Annabel said. “I mean, the strangest people come up sometimes and say they’re lost, and Daddy believes them.”

“Gated communities should be unconstitutional,” Alice said.

Then they were there. The palm at the end of the mind, Alice thought when they arrived, a line from a poem she’d read at school. The teacher had spoiled it for her somewhat by saying that the poet, according to his notebooks, had considered another line for that slot. The alp at the end of the street. She could hardly imagine anyone getting to the palm at the end of the mind via the alp at the end of the street, but the ability to do so, she thought, was what this place was all about. They were all solipsists in Green Palms, all heroes and heroines of their own vanishing consciousness.

Corvus suggested that Alice and Annabel think of the people here as already being dead, which meant that visiting with them and doing little things like rubbing cream into their hands or spraying a pleasant scent on their pillows was something very special.

Annabel protested this.

“That seems awfully extreme,” Alice admitted.

“When you’re with them, have a picture in your mind of yourself drinking from a glass,” Corvus said. “And picture the glass as already being broken, shattered.”

Annabel had never seen Corvus so … animated, if you could call it that.

Inside, Alice was given a Mr. Barlow and a Very Brucie and an Ottolie. Annabel was assigned to a Mrs. Fresnet. “Oh, that’s that inexpensive champagne,” she said. “Is she part of that champagne empire?”

“Do Mrs. Fresnet, and then we’ll see about you,” a nurse’s aide said.

Corvus was directed to a waiting room where a number of residents were waiting for a marimba player who’d failed to show up. It had been an hour now. “You’re going to be a terrific disappointment to them,” the aide said, “but you’d be doing staff a big favor.”

Annabel was looking at something crumpled standing in the hallway, saying “A nice soft peach” over and over. People hobbled and eddied around her. It was a little crumpled man, and he had been saying “A nice soft peach” for about ten minutes now. She approached Mrs. Fresnet’s room with dread.

Alice went to Mr. Barlow’s room first. Mr. Barlow had been a professional gardener — the master gardener, actually, in Washington’s Floral Library — who couldn’t care less now about his tulips, or any tulips: the Mary Poppins, the Dreaming Maid, the White Triumphator, the Queen of Night. Alice couldn’t get much out of Mr. Barlow, who just stared at her with glittering eyes. Very Brucie was better. He still had some odds and ends to relate. In his youth, he said, he had been handsome and reckless, and the wild things he had done had been referred to as “very Brucie.” He had a barely viable roommate whose presence didn’t bother him at all. The only difficulty was when the man’s son visited, which put a strain on everyone. The son, a bald, florid man in a tight gray suit, had visited intensively in recent weeks, playing the “Rosa Mystica” at his father’s bedside on a small tape recorder. The “Rosa Mystica” was supposed to be unbind-and-assist music, but the father didn’t die and the son stopped coming. Alice wondered if the tape she’d seen in the parking lot that very morning — broken and unraveled, smashed, really, it appeared to have been run over or stomped on — was the same. No way to know for a certainty.

The air in Green Palms felt restrained. There was a sense that salvation was being deliberately, cruelly withheld. And there was a speechless concurrence that it was hardly significant that in their lives the birthday presents had been purchased, the weeding done, the letter written, the windows washed, or the preburial contract sensibly arranged. And if, with some effort, they could recall the affairs that had been consummated, the roads taken, the languages mastered, the queer meals eaten in foreign lands, of what lasting consequence was that? This had been the destination all the while. Having been a good householder, having run a tight ship, having fought the good fight, whatever, it mattered not at all. Alice pushed Very Brucie in his silent shiny chair around the hallways, her hands trembling a little. She was here because of Corvus.

Mrs. Fresnet, who, as far as Annabel could ascertain, was not of the Fresnet empire, was worrying that her “Do not revive” form was not on file. Annabel went to the office to inquire and came back with a copy of it. Mrs. Fresnet took the form and studied it, then smiled at Annabel. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” Annabel asked, smiling back. “For your peace of mind?”

“But this is a copy,” Mrs. Fresnet said, “not the real thing. The only real thing they give you in here is custard.” She opened her mouth wide, and Annabel was afraid she was going to let out a corker of a scream, but Mrs. Fresnet slowly closed her mouth again. “I have fifteen dollars in my account that can be withdrawn weekly for personal hygiene, and I want you to withdraw that fifteen dollars and keep it. It’s yours. Then I want you to get me out of here and drive me away, out in the desert into the sun-steeped scene of a bigger, darker world.”

It couldn’t be sun-steeped and dark at the same time, Annabel thought, but you had to give these people some latitude. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t have a license to drive. I don’t have a car.”

“When I was your age, I was more resourceful,” Mrs. Fresnet said. Then she opened her mouth again and gave an ear-splitting, sustained scream. Annabel ran out of the room to the nurse’s station, where the same glum aide was presiding.

“She feels better after she does that,” the aide said. “Then she asks for some cup custard, and you’re supposed to get the cup custard and sit there while she eats it, which will take, in your perception, forever.”

“Please tell my friends I’ll be waiting for them in the van,” Annabel said.

“The van’s not out there now.”

“I’ll wait for them in the place the van’s supposed to be when it’s there,” Annabel said. She was never coming inside this place again.

Alice had advanced to Ottolie, who resembled an iguana. She sat in her chair, wrapped in an iguana-colored shawl, and didn’t acknowledge Alice for some time.

“I never sleep, you know,” Ottolie finally said. “Never. Someone sleeps for me. She lives in Nebraska.”

“That’s great!” Alice said.

“Aksarben. That’s where I get a lot of my people. You have to learn how to delegate tasks.”

“I love your name,” Alice said. “It’s such a pretty name. Could you spell it for me?” Alice had picked up a brochure at the desk that said visitors should engage the residents in simple recall.

“I’ve changed my name.” Ottolie slowly blinked her eyes. “When I was a little girl traveling with my parents, their name was Wright. Mr. and Mrs. Wright. We all had a horse named Tony. Tony the horse. Have you ever had to bury a horse? It’s a heck of a dilemma. You need your father to do it. They’re the ones who do it best. Mothers are no good for that situation. Do you know what might happen to you tomorrow? You could fall or be pushed. You could be the result of a random bullet.” She leaned toward Alice with the details. “Somebody celebrating his baby daughter’s birthday, firing a gun into the air. You happened to be in the vicinity. Wasn’t intended for you, was meant to fall harmlessly to earth, but it ended up on your plate anyway. Or mercury could leak through your gloves. Say you were conducting an experiment with a type of mercury that had no known relevance to anything and it splashed on your skin and there you’d be, six months down the road, rotting from the inside out. You’d say to yourself, Why was I fooling around?”

A nurse walked by Ottolie’s room and waved.

“Every person who dies in here,” Ottolie confided, “is the victim of one of those bitches relieving their sexual tension. They strangle us, and it relieves their sexual tension. I’m sure you don’t know anything about sexual tension — you’re too skinny — but these nurses have it.”

Another nurse passed by.

“That one’s the worst,” Ottolie said.

They both regarded the empty doorway and the wedge of waxed corridor beyond. Actually, Alice did have some suspicions about the nurses. In a book she’d been reading about nurses’ experiences in Vietnam she had come across one nurse’s account of goober contests. The nurse was working in a ward where no one ever got better, no one. They were all just boys in there, none of them much older than twenty, and they were all comatose and mostly limbless and the nurses would upon occasion, usually national holidays, place them in competition with one another. Bets were taken, money changed hands. The nurses would prop them all up in bed and arrange the beds in a row. Each nurse had a boy and each would clean out her boy’s tracheotomy hole at the same moment and the boys would involuntarily shoot out these big balls of phlegm, sometimes a considerable distance. The nurse recounted that she had had a hard time adjusting when she returned home, which was of little surprise to Alice. The boys who had shot the goobers were long dead, and the girl nurses were old women now, recalling their youth.

Alice decided against sharing the nurse’s tale with Ottolie, who was still formulating another tomorrow for Alice.

“You could be making a sandwich and accidentally set yourself on fire. Do you know how to make a sandwich? You have to preheat the oven to three hundred degrees.”

Corvus appeared in the doorway. Ottolie smiled at her and said, “I think you’re someone else.”

“It’s time for me to go, Ottolie,” Alice said.

“You know when I knew I was a goner?” Ottolie said, “I was about to explain the mountains to a friend. I was about to say, ‘There are the Mustang and the Whetstone Ranges, then, less sharply cut, are the Rincons and Tanque Verde, while soft in the distance loom the noble Santa Catalinas.’ I was about to raise my arm and grandly indicate but I could not raise my arm. I’d forgotten how it was you caused your arm to be raised.”

“I’m sorry, I have to go now,” Alice said. “I’ll see you next week.”

“On the other side of the valley are the Mules, the Dragoons, the Winchesters, and the distant wild Galiuros.” Ottolie pursed her lips. “The distant wild Galiuros,” she called, as if to someone.

As Alice and Corvus were leaving, they passed a lady bent almost double creeping down the hallway, gripping her walker. She was making up her grocery list. “Flour, yeast, raisins,” she said. “Tea, eggs, grits. A good broom. A good broom …”

18

Carter came into the living room and saw the three girls sitting on the sofa.

“So, what are you plotting today?” he said merrily. He felt exceptional after an uneasy week. Donald had encouraged him to go on a fast where he drank nothing but water and ate only a kind of clay, and he felt exhilarated if somewhat weak. The black scorpioid toxins that had appeared in the toilet bowl were — well he didn’t want to dwell on them, but they were damn impressive. Appalling, of course, but now he could understand the quiet pride people could take in the purification of their intestinal tract. He felt wonderful and was quite unaware that he looked haggard and unwell.

Alice looked up at him, startled. Her face was mobile and expressive, and what he saw on it now was dismay and random guilt. She would not do well in a police lineup.

“Mr. Vineyard,” she said.

“Hi,” Carter said, thinking he should start over. They all were looking at him in astonishment. Madness is flight, he always thought when he saw Corvus, such a curious name, though lovely. He’d never understood why Ginger had insisted on the awkward name, Annabel, for their bundle of issue. It brought to mind a dairy.

He looked at his dear Annabel. “Honey,” he said, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Are you all right, Daddy?”

“I’m fine,” Carter crowed. Thank God for Donald and his clay. And Ginger hadn’t visited him for the last several nights. Maybe she was actually … gone. He was cautiously optimistic. The last time she’d shown up, she kept asking, “Do you think I have pretty eyes?” but he’d had the wit not to look at them, into them, whatever. Her eyes had never been particularly pretty, though he would’ve been out of his mind to have said so. They were normal eyes, he recalled, in no way transfixing.

“We were thinking of going on a camping trip,” Annabel said, “and I was saying I could make a soufflé but—”

Carter frowned. “A soufflé?”

“—but Alice said just hard-boiled eggs.”

“Isn’t it too hot to go camping? Though I don’t mean to block any tendency toward enthusiasm.”

“It’s more of a retreat,” Alice said.

“You’re awfully young for retreats,” Carter said.

“Daddy,” Annabel said, “we are not children.”

“I’d be afraid of the bears.”

“Oh, Daddy.”

“I would.”

“Bears were extirpated from this area,” Alice said, “more than fifty years ago.”

“In my reading the other day, I came across this line by John Muir,” Carter said. “ ‘Bears are not companions of men but tenderly loved children of God.’ ” He directed this to Alice. He liked old Alice.

“What utter crap,” Alice said.

“He was a fine man,” Carter protested. “He began the American conservation movement.”

“I hate people who talk like that,” Alice said. “It mixes everything up.”

“He wrote a very nice book about a dog,” Carter persisted. “Stickeen.”

Alice was unimpressed. Corvus looked at him and smiled.

“Do you have a dog?” Carter asked.

“No,” Corvus said. For an instant he gazed openly at her face, which didn’t seem quite human to him. Or rather, it was human but one that most humans didn’t happen to have. That was preposterous, of course. Suddenly he felt a bit wobbly. What he needed was a big milk shake.

“I should get you all library cards,” he said, trying to shake off what seemed to him a curious numbness. “Wouldn’t you all like your own library card? Many a summer hour was made delightful to me through books as a boy.”

“That was then, Daddy,” Annabel said.

“Well, yes,” Carter said.

“This is now.”

He was reluctant to admit it. He sat down opposite them but, eliciting looks of disappointment, bounded to his feet again. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your deliberations.”

“Here comes Donald,” Annabel said. “He just drove up.”

Donald! In his little lotus white car. Carter’s heart soared. At the same time, he thought he glimpsed a vulture rising on voluptuary wings from the swimming pool, where it had been hunched, drinking. Remarkable, the things that came to drink. Sad, somehow. He excused himself and hurried out to greet Donald, to direct or be directed in their labors together.

“Is he still the gardener?” Alice asked.

“Of course he’s still the gardener. What do you mean?” Annabel was looking at the hiking boots she’d just bought for this expedition. Never in her life had she encountered anything so totally without charm.

“Well, there doesn’t seem much left to do around here. It all looks pretty nice.”

“Some people get very involved in gardening, Alice. It can become a lifelong obsession. Sometimes they just move rocks around together. Donald is a big believer in fighting ass … acid — God, what is that word?”

“Acedia,” Corvus said.

“That’s right! You are so good, Corvus. You could go on Jeopardy or something. It means sloth, right?”

“It means more like experiencing the moment as an oppressive weight. It means listlessness of spirit.” Corvus pushed a fallen wing of black hair behind her ear.

Annabel didn’t know what else to do, so she smiled generously. “Well, he’s got Daddy moving those rocks, all right.”

Alice was inquiring as to what Carter’s occupation actually was.

“He was trained to design things. Not office buildings or skyscrapers but other stuff. Not houses or furniture either, exactly. He was trained to make use of space, Alice. But he never did. I guess he and Mommy just wanted to relax. He was asked to design a zoo once. He had some wonderful ideas for it. It was in Newark and had a tropical rain forest wing. It had mold and microbes and everything. Plus one of those quetzal birds. I remember because I asked for one of its feathers after it died. But I never got one, or if I did I can’t remember what happened to it. But it really was a good zoo. There was an elephant there who painted pictures with her trunk. Watercolors. You could buy them.”

“They made an elephant paint watercolors?”

“She liked it, I think. But they weren’t very good.”

“This was your father’s idea, to make an elephant paint watercolors?”

“Oh no, she’d always painted. She’d been at the old zoo for a long time and she’d been painting there too.”

“Zoos are prisons, Annabel.”

“But that’s just the point. Daddy wanted to make it more pleasant. His idea was to build invisible walls or something so nothing would know it was in prison.”

“ ‘Invisible walls’? What do you think an invisible wall is?” Alice demanded.

“Alice, stop hounding me! She’s hounding me again,” she said to Corvus. She’d heard you could marginalize people by abstracting them in their presence, referring to them to another as though they weren’t there. It was a social skill she wished she were better at. It didn’t work at all with Alice.

“What did the quetzal do? Fly into the invisible wall? Was your father upset when it died? Did he feel he had blood on his hands?”

“Of course not. It could’ve died of old age as far as anyone knew. It just died. Really, you know what you inspire people to do, Alice? Lie. You inspire them to lie. You ask a question and then you get so annoyed when you hear the answer—”

“All answers are annoying,” Alice said.

“My father never designed a zoo, all right? He never did!”

“Did he ever design one of those special rooms in airports where people are escorted to hear the news about plane crashes?”

Annabel looked at her.

“Will anyone waiting for the arrival of Flight 501 please go immediately to the Privacy Lounge,” Alice intoned. “I wonder what those rooms are like. Do they use them for anything else, or is it all set up for that one specific purpose?”

“You are so heartless,” Annabel said.

“I bet you won’t find any invisible walls in one of those places.”

“If your granny and poppa went down in a place crash, you’d be upset.”

“They haven’t flown in years. It hurts their sinuses. I’d be upset,” Alice said.

“And what about that stupid Sherwin? If flaming Sherwin went down in flames, you’d be upset.”

“I don’t know, actually,” Alice said.

“He is so disturbing. I hate the way he looks at you, it’s such a disturbing look.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t mind that so much.”

“He looks at Corvus in a disturbing way too, I think.”

“That’s because Corvus is so cool,” Alice said lightly.

Corvus shook her head and laughed.

“There’s no way you could have a loving, fulfilling relationship with him,” Annabel was saying. “Plus he’s way old.”

“He’s twenty-six. That’s not even ten years older.”

“He is lying,” Annabel yelped. “See, you just bring that out in people. You know what I think of when I see him looking at you? I think ‘white slavery.’ ‘White slavery,’ ” she repeated a little uncertainly. “I think he’d use you to set up a situation for himself. You’d get men for him somehow. You’d be together, which would look weird of course, but that would intrigue certain men he wouldn’t be able to get otherwise with those repugnant looks of his.”

We could be two on a party, Sherwin had said to Alice, you and me.

“Those people are so jaded, you know, it’s hard to know what they really think,” Annabel continued. “Do you ever ask him what he feels? I bet he says, ‘I don’t feel anything.’ I think he’s shy and lonely and used to getting stuff even if it’s not exactly what he wanted. It’s not just the bad skin. One time I had a crush on a football player with bad skin. But he was a football player. And there was a boy who had a limp I liked. One leg was a little bit shorter than the other, but otherwise he was adorable and very, very popular. Sometimes being a little imperfect is interesting, only Sherwin isn’t just imperfect, he’s … they don’t even like women. They think we’re fish or something, they—”

“Fish?”

“Yes, they call us fish, Alice, they have no respect at all.”

Two on a party, and when the party ends you’ll still have a life ahead of you. There’d still be time for another life, he’d said.

“I wouldn’t even consider friendship with him, if I were you.”

“I don’t,” Alice said. She had lost the tiniest bit of interest in Sherwin in recent days, however reluctant she was to admit it. She’d discovered she wasn’t interested in the human mystery. It was the nonhuman mystery that held, if not exactly promise, at least the clues, though they weren’t exactly clues either, and Sherwin with his “You wanna be my girl pupil? You wanna be my Eustochium?” was getting on her nerves. Sherwin, she was beginning to realize, represented the human mystery in one of its most convoluted and self-conscious forms. He said when he left this place, he’d send for her, send her a ticket. Would she join him there?

“If you got a free ticket to somewhere, would you take it?” Alice asked.

“Oh, I would,” Annabel said. “My God. Out of here? No question.”

“I don’t think I would,” Corvus said.

Living in that Airstream had made her even odder, Annabel thought, but she wasn’t surprised that Corvus wouldn’t accept a free ticket. She’d insist on making her own ticket, out of flattened thorns or something. And it wouldn’t even get her anywhere! Not really. Not to like Rome, say, or Paris.

“I know this is just an imaginary ticket,” Annabel said, “just a ‘what if,’ but are you really going to stay around here forever, Corvus? Won’t Social Services get on your case or something?”

Alice said, “Annabel—”

“Well, I’m just being sensible.”

“Who wanted to make a soufflé on the camping trip?” Alice demanded.

“I mean, the first thing Daddy and I did when my mother died was, we just fled. All our stuff was shipped out afterwards, even Mommy’s stuff, which dismayed Daddy, he thought he’d left very specific instructions. I was a little upset at first because we fled like thieves, practically, but now I realize a person can’t just continue to adapt to certain sorrowful locales. If I had to keep driving past that restaurant on my way someplace, over and over that spot on the road, I—”

“Annabel,” Alice said, “when we go on our retreat, we’re not going to talk so much.”

“Oh, it’s fine when you’re talking,” Annabel said. “And why do you keep calling it a retreat? That sounds so moody. Why don’t we just commune with nature? Isn’t that what people are supposed to do when they go camping?”

“We’ll put a mattress in the back of Corvus’s truck and drive as far as we can on one of those fire trails. We’ll spend the first night in the truck, then we’ll hike all day and come back to the truck at night. We’ll try to find that little waterfall.” Like the bighorn, Alice had never seen the little waterfall, while others claimed they had.

“I’ll bet there’s trash around it,” Annabel said. “Those things are just magnets for people’s trash. But nature doesn’t care. We’ll be communing with uncaring nature.” Oh, Alice sometimes made her feel so foul. “I hope we’re not going tomorrow,” she said crossly. “I have things to do tomorrow.”

“Alice and I are at Green Palms tomorrow,” Corvus said.

Annabel would never enter that place again. Her mother would say, “If I had to be buried like that, I’d rather not die.” She said it after every funeral she and Carter went to. Her poor mother! She had loved getting dressed up and going to funerals and saying funny, awful things about everyone afterward.

She looked outside. Carter and Donald were in bathing trunks and lying side by side on bright blue pool mats. The two of them were not moving rocks at all.

19

Ray had considered carrying a fetish with him, but number one, he didn’t believe in them — he’d seen the carvers bring them in by the gunnysack, like pecans — and number two, his little monkey was fetish enough for anybody. The little monkey had been quiet lately, maybe because it dug the flute music that was always playing in the store. Ray would be grateful, extremely grateful, if he didn’t have to worry about it all the time. The monkey might finally be settling down, perhaps even realizing that it and Ray were one, that this had been the purpose of its sacrifice. Theirs was not a symbiotic relationship, though. The little monkey never had any opinions of its own; say Ray had a girl someday, he didn’t think the little monkey would have an opinion about that. Ray could hardly say, “So what do you think?” He just wanted it not to be distraught. He wanted it to be conscious and not distraught, was that too much to ask? If it were unconscious, or rather if Ray became unconscious of it, matters would be worse. It’s the stuff you’re unaware of that kills you.

Regarding his camping gear, Ray had been canny. He’d ordered a tent, some fancy freeze-dried food, and binoculars from a catalog, received the delivery, and then denied he had, having signed for it in invisible ink. What stuff he’d learned in Cub Scouts! He might as well have gone to grifter school. He’d picked up a lot in those prestroke days. He wished there’d been more of them.

Besides scamming some of the larger items, he’d indulged himself by purchasing a few things as well, such as a knife and compass. He bought a walking stick with the knob carved into the shape of a grizzly’s head (Grizz = hunter, nature’s pharmacist) though he liked the brown bear’s stick better (power, adaptability) because it followed more naturally the whorls and ways of the wood. But he ended up with the Grizz. Who knew the dynamic behind the purchasing impulse, anyway? If he knew that, he could be hired anywhere; he’d be paid for simply not talking to the competition. He bought a snakebite kit that looked a little Mickey Mouse to him (Mouse = servility, conformity), but at least it was a contingency that had been packaged. Seeing as how there wasn’t an antidote to everything, it behooved you to grab whatever you could.

It was his first solo trek, though he truthfully couldn’t consider it a trek: he would never be more than twenty miles from something, some ranch or working mine or trapline shack. He had maps. Still, if it wasn’t a trek itself it might lead to one, and then another, and then the trek would become a true and endless one. There’d be secret knowledge. Fulfillment. He’d come back just to prepare to go out again to remote, empty, and beautiful places where self and sanity had no more meaning than the wind dropping at nightfall. He’d experience the no meaning and he’d feel entire, not all chopped up the way he felt now. The little monkey knew about these things, it knew about the validity of no meaning. Ray gave it credit for that, the little monkey had suffered, and it knew. It existed in no temporal future. The past, the light that shone externally upon it, even when the eyes of monitors and data crunchers had wearied of it, shone still.

Ray was at the ranger station the moment it opened, his stomach burning from too much coffee. The ranger was taking his time displaying a grouping of pop-up books to their best advantage. He pulled the tab on the elf owl lurching out of the saguaro. He pulled the tab on the jackrabbit hightailing it away from the hawk. He pulled the tab on the bobcat swiping at a butterfly.

“I could use a little help with this map here,” Ray said. Rangers peddling merchandise — it wasn’t right. It was supposed to be a dangerous occupation, and here he was fiddling around with kiddie books. The nameplate above his pocket read “Darling.”

The ranger ambled over to where Ray stood. Ray spread out the map and told him his plans. The ranger blinked at him, seemingly unimpressed. “You in good health?”

“Hey,” Ray said.

“My mother, when she had her stroke, her face pulled down just so.” He tugged at his own lip.

“What the hey,” Ray said.

The ranger shrugged. “Here’s a pretty hike for the time you got. Two days in, a day there, two days out. You take the West Fork Trail four miles into Harold’s Canyon, follow that until its junction with Scorpion Flat, take a right on Bitter Biscuit Trail about six miles until it tops out at Bless Your Heart Peak. If you come across the cairn with the red paint on it, you’ve gone too far, that’s the conjunction of Pig Root and Bill Bustard Trail.… There’s a birders’ cabin there.”

Ray snatched his map back. Man made him not want any instruction whatsoever. What kind of idleness was it, naming everything like that? He and Darling did not part on the friendliest of terms. Ray lunged up West Fork Trail at a trot and six hours later didn’t know where he was. But that was fine with him. That was fine.

On the afternoon of his second day he came across the birders’ cabin. He consulted his map. Maybe they’d moved it. The cabin was locked and the windows were shuttered. The lock was a long cylindrical one with letters instead of numbers on the falls. Ray spun “GONE BIRDING,” and it sprang open. People were so transparent, he thought, so suspicious and simplistic and coy. He dropped his pack on the porch, then took off his hat and rubbed his sweaty hair vigorously with both hands. Inside the cabin was neat and had the civilizing touch of womankind, of avid, affluent, educated female birders. It must be nice to come up here, spot the rare birdies on their nests, listen to their songs. Ray knew nothing about birds. There was some dove that said who cooks for you-all, that was about all he knew. Of course the dove didn’t really say that, he knew that too.

The large, open room was filled with bunks and tables, and along the back wall was a glass case filled with avian specimens. The method here was to collect the whole package: mom and dad, nest, eggs, nestlings in various stages of growth. Ray was head-to-head with some type of flycatcher here. Nest made of the midribs of mesquite leaves, quail feathers, and thatch, the tag read, and bound with insect threads. “A unique domed cradle of particular artistry.” “That’s true,” Ray said aloud. The eggs were dappled, all lavender and red. “Clutch,” Ray said. The word just came to him. There was a sudden sizzle in the back of his skull as though a seam were running down it. Of the smallest nestling, the tag’s comment read, “This newly hatched youngster looks little different from the worm it was being fed.” “Where would we be without that valuable insight?” Ray remarked loudly. He picked up one of the adult birds; it was dry and light as a piece of popcorn. This was a little weird, he thought, bordering on the indecent. How would the birders like to have their skulls made into bird feeders? Put it in their wills, show a real dedication to their lifelong hobby. Ray would suggest it to them. He found a pen in a drawer along with lined data sheets. “Fetched another set!” was scrawled on one. A sadistic activity, bird counting. Ray pressed the pen down, but his intention was dissolving like mist. He pressed harder, but the pen didn’t move. Then it made a few quick, unsatisfactory marks. Ray looked up, chastised. There were dried flowers in a vase, a big framed photograph of laughing people in khaki and floppy hats. He had wished harm upon them, had contrived to insult them, his own kind. He had the sensation that the back of his head was splitting open, little fingers curling and pressing the folds of matter back. He looked at what he’d written. His handwriting … he should exercise more caution with it. Discouraging. He found his hat and pulled it carefully onto his head. The hat and the headache got along, he’d found.

He left the cabin without closing it up and gathered up his pack and stick. His fleeting equanimity toward the birders had vanished. He picked up the lock and threw it quite a distance. “Go birding in Hell!” he yelled. His own shout cheered him. He struck off toward the west, where already the crescent moon was visible, and made a careless camp just before dark. He ate two candy bars, then lay flat on a blanket and stared up at the wheeling heavens. They were really tearing around tonight. Birds meant … they meant freedom, that’s what had gotten him so upset back there. But at the same time, birds were different from what they were supposed to mean. The wings of a bird were in fact its forelimbs. When you got on the road of thinking about anything for too long, you just had to turn back, had to turn back.

At dawn, Ray was up and hiking. By ten o’clock, he still hadn’t come across anybody. What, did they name these stupid trails and then never set foot on them again? He was looking through his binoculars at an abandoned mine-shaft hole. There was the ore cart. He glassed the canyon wall, then idled down through the dense brush, clinging close to a winding dry wash. Among the tans and rounded greens he saw a pile of white, which he determined after a moment was a bighorn sheep. If it had been raised and released by Fish and Wildlife personnel, it had to be dumb as a post. Then he determined that it was too immobile even for the activity of dumb rumination, that it was, indeed, dead. He hastened toward it. It was a ram and only recently dead. As an animal, it had been compact and efficient and powerful, but it didn’t have a clue what it was up to now. It was meat, nascent square cut, chops, riblets, and shank, right out of his mother’s The Joy of Cooking. But of course people didn’t eat these things, they resourced out the head and horns. Though the horns were small, a determined Zuni could still get scores of fetishes out of them.

The ram didn’t look as if it had been shot, it had just damn died. In Ray’s opinion, this was a transplant. Transplants were addled as a rule, they could never really shake the tranquilizers. The condors being made in California could drown in a puddle. Ray wanted the ram, wanted to report it to that dickhead, Darling. He took off his pack and managed to pick the animal up and heave it onto his shoulders. Clutching its legs, he staggered a few steps before he rolled it back onto the ground. Then he dug out the compass and map and absorbed himself in their arcane projections. He knew where he was. A direct route back would make his trek look like a scalene triangle. He couldn’t make it to the ranger’s station before dark, but he’d be there by the next morning. Ray rooted the nonessentials out of his pack — why the heck had he brought cologne? — and clipped a ditty bag to his belt. He glanced at the pricey gear he was leaving behind and saw it for what it was: pilferage, vain pilferage. The walking stick looked downright foppish. Ray felt he’d already gained some inner knowledge on this trip. What was important now was getting the ram out; it was giving a shape to his trek, just like the angle of return. Yeah, he’d be packing out a bighorn!

After a few hours, Ray was suspecting that the beauty of the scalene triangle was an illusion of exuberant misperception. Maybe the shortest distance between two points didn’t exist in nature. He’d tied the ram to his back at one point to steady it, but when he slipped and fell he’d just about had his ear knocked off by a hoof. He looked with disfavor at the steep arroyo; like every damn one of them, it was just something to scrabble down, then scrabble up again. He was trying to drink less water when he rested, devoting himself to tweezering out cactus spines. Some larval life-form that had commenced work on the ram’s belly had gotten under his shirt, or maybe that was his imagination. He felt as if he’d been transporting live coals. After tweezing out everything he could reach, he heaved the ram up onto his shoulders once again and it fell familiarly into place. Still, the weight immediately began to affect him. He should gut the thing out, but that would be a diminishment of his coming triumph. He took a few crablike steps over the shale, then skidded into a partial fall for twenty feet. The next time he fell twenty feet, he passed out and dreamed of lemonade, of the way they used to make it from ants back in his cubby days. He was popping big-headed ants into the water per instruction of the cub master, who was saying, “These are of the soldier caste, and their heads are huge and swollen so that they may more effectively block the nest entrance.” … Explanations weren’t what were essential now, though, Ray thought, it was the thirst that was important. He dreamed of thirst.

20

State investigators were prowling the halls of Green Palms trying to determine if the poor old souls were being served greyhound in their ground meat dishes. It had been discovered that the little kids at Jiminy Cricket Day Care had been eating greyhound tacos all that month and already were showing severe emotional and behavioral problems simply by being told about it, problems that were now expected to persist well into their teens and possibly beyond. But no proof was found that the old people had been gumming down racing dogs. The elderly inmates, their blood flow slowed to a trickle as it labored up to and around their brains, did not, in fact, give the possibility much credence.

“Doesn’t taste much like greyhound to me,” Elmer said. “It doesn’t taste fast.”

“For most inhabitants of modern industrialized nations,” Alice said, “the principal contact with other species does take place at the dinner table.”

“I won a hundred and fifty bucks once on a horse named Miss Whirl, which was the closest I’ve been to the animal kingdom,” Elmer said. “Not to disagree with you, kid.”

“This your granpa?” the investigator asked Alice.

“Sure he is,” Elmer said.

“I’d shoot myself before I ended up in a place like this,” the investigator confided. “My girlfriend’s interning at Mercy, and you know what they call folks like this there — the ones always clogging up the ER? They call ’em crocks and fogies. They call ’em snags, rounders, shoppers, and crud.”

Alice didn’t much care for this investigator.

“Is this the closest we’re going to get?” Elmer said. “This ground-up greyhound you have to take by spoon? For months I’ve been begging them for an injection. Smash the testicles of a young dog, I say, pass it through filter paper, inject via the leg, and bingo—the diminution of the function of one’s sexual glands will be reversed! One will feel physically improved!”

She didn’t like Elmer either.

The investigator gave a thick chortle, a sort of wet gurgle in which Alice detected the birth of his own cardiovascular problems and irreversible mental decline. She hoped.

She walked down the hall, peeking into the rooms. Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. She paused at Annie’s, for she was not sleeping but sitting upright in her chair, watching the six bird feeders — tray, oval, and tubular — that hung at her window and to which no birds came, principally because they hung within rather than without, Annie not trusting the space beyond, a patio occupied by an immense cooling and heating system that serviced the entire floor. Annie had been the subject of some discussion ever since her daughter had brought her husband’s ashes over and placed them in the bottom of her bureau. Annie had not been told that her husband of fifty-seven years had died, since Green Palms frowned on such information being imparted. What was the point when grief was not germane, when it could not be comprehended or withstood? Here only the moment existed. Annie gave no sign that she inferred that her husband rested near her in the third drawer, the one she’d never used much, even when the handsome bureau had resided in the bedroom of the yellow farmhouse in the orange grove they had tended. Annie and her husband had known those trees, the peculiarities and pedigree of each, their yield, the ones the cardinals favored.

“Let them be together, they want to be together,” the daughter had said, dropping off the ashes. She felt badly about allowing her father to starve himself to death in the sensible efficiency she’d found for him after selling the grove against his wishes.

His ashes were packed in a box made of orangewood. Everyone who passed Annie’s room could smell the insistent fragrance. There had been a little shop on the highway side of the grove where Annie and her husband had sold bags of oranges and orange perfume and orange wine, orange blossom honey and boxes made of orangewood with a mirror inserted within the lid. This was one of those.

The staff was quietly observing Annie’s reactions, but she hadn’t had any. The orange was definitely making all the effort. Annie was one of the dear ones, the sweetie pies, still neat and continent and mild, but a wolf or a goose would have sensed and then grieved the loss of its mate more than Annie had, a limpet would’ve detected something missing. If specific compounds could create little dead islands in the brain, could annihilate the glowing shade-wracked jungle of caring and desire and delight and flatten it all to a sunbaked crust over which not even the most primitive thought crept or left a track, of what possible use was anything that happened to a person in this life? It made the staff wonder, even at $6.50 an hour. And although what they knew about neurofibrillary tangles and neuron-secreting chemicals could be fit onto the tip of a pencil, it made them pause as they prepared to go home with a rose and a piece of sheet cake, for visitors were forever bringing sheet cakes and roses to this place. But quickly there was no time for wondering, for the meal had to be made, the bills paid, the child’s drawing appreciated, that crayoned drawing of the spiderweb that looked like the sun.

Alice lingered, chewing on her fingers, thinking about Tommy and all the stories she’d read about grieving creatures, the faithful hounds that wouldn’t depart the hospital steps, the dock, the bar, the bier where the object of their ardor had last been seen. Animals were prescient, determined psychics, insistent in their speechless warnings, their final spectral farewells. Weren’t they always showing up at their loved one’s office in the next town scratching and whining, their silky coats mussed, their ghostly eyes beseeching, when in fact they lay in the street miles away, crushed by a speeding car? Weren’t they always howling and carrying on at the very moment the daughter away at college was being introduced to the serial killer, when the son was skidding into the head-on crash, when the master was breathing his last in intensive care? Weren’t they always wagging their tail in some dead beloved’s garden at something that wasn’t there? And here was Annie, who hadn’t experienced the slightest discomfort when her husband died of starvation, the last thing to see his stomach a bit of oatmeal. They hadn’t spent a night apart in fifty-seven years before she’d dropped that teacup, the lustrous leaves of the orange trees quaking above her, the dropping of a teacup the death visitant, the beginning of the end for many of the female inhabitants of Green Palms. Here now was Annie, blue eyes widely alert, alert to nothing, watching those empty feeding stations. The world was all a mare’s nest to Annie. There was no sign, she gave no sign. There was not the thinnest spirit wire of connection in that room. There was nothing.

Orange labored in a void.

21

Carter appreciated the constellations. There was the summer Triangle high in the sky. There were the wings of Aquila and Cygnus. Just before midnight the ringing phone had awakened him, but he’d decided to let the machine get it. Let the machine get it, he thought. But then he had grown curious and loped into the other room and pushed the message button.

“Granpa’s coming home from the nursing home tomorrow,” a woman’s flat voice said. “It’s the business office’s doing. They’re turning him over to us, barks and whistles and all.”

She seemed to be calling from a take-out restaurant. “Triple bacon and jalapeño number fourteen’s getting cold here!” someone bawled.

“Any suggestions?” the voice paused.

“Twenty-one up, twenty-three—”

“I know you’re there, you dirty bugger. You’d better pick up …”

Carter returned to the bedroom. His Hermès fox-and-hen tie lay on the floor. He was sure he’d put it away. Was Ginger showing up when he wasn’t even in the room? Was she distracting him with wrong numbers, the voices of unfamiliars, so she could do something unpleasant? There were impossible phenomena like Ginger, and then there were even more impossible phenomena of a higher and more disturbing order than Ginger. He examined the tie, which appeared unharmed. He hung it carefully on a rack with its more somber companions.

He turned off the lights and resumed gazing at the stars through the enormous windows. It was really quite a nice house, Carter thought. The evening was quiet. Then there was the unmistakable sound of someone mangling his mailbox at the end of the driveway with a baseball bat. Through the silken air he heard it clearly — a dozen lurid wallops followed by the screech of a car’s tires. Then silence again.

“Daddy?” whispered Annabel at the door. “Daddy, can I come in?” He opened the door to the hall, but Annabel wasn’t there.

“Honey?” he said.

She simply wasn’t there. She was in her own neat and fragrant room sleeping, dreaming she was in a department store buying gloves, long, white, elbow-length gloves with three tiny pearl buttons at the wrist. Her mother was the salesperson and was performing in that capacity with aloof professionalism. Down aisles heaped with goods Annabel drifted — all head, as is the custom in dreams, more consciousness than head, really, with the sense she was behind her head, it being a mask of sorts that fit around her like airy rubber. Then it was no longer a store but a beach. She and her parents had prepared a picnic, and her mother was putting up the beach umbrella while her father was laying out the plaid blanket and mixing up the Dark and Stormys in the brightly colored aluminum cups. It was a lovely deserted white sand beach with soft grasses and less than the usual amount of garbage discarded from ships destined for distant, unexotic lands. Her father was proceeding efficiently, having already provided Annabel with her favorite cup filled with cranberry juice and well into sampling his own rum and ginger beer, but her mother seemed to be having some difficulty arranging herself. She kept jamming the umbrella pole into the sand, but the point would not set properly. The tip proved to be covered with shell and yolk, which at first glance didn’t present itself as such but which, as her mother continued to stab and root about and raise and plunge the pole again and again, became more adamantly shell and yolk. Ginger had selected a sea turtle’s nest for their umbrella site and had scrambled its leathery contents to a briny batter.

Annabel woke up, displeased.

What made the dream particularly unpleasant was that this picnic had indeed occurred, more or less, and unfortunately had degenerated in a similar manner. Annabel had never had a dream so redundant.

22

Corvus, Corvus. They kept calling her name. He didn’t know the names of the other two. One was very pretty, and the other one, who didn’t even remember him, was just a madwoman. How could she totally not remember him? There was something not right about her.

“ ‘Corvus,’ ” he said. “Doesn’t that mean raven?”

He didn’t think she was going to speak, but then she said, “It’s a constellation too.”

“Oh yeah, where is it?”

“It’s by Virgo to the south.”

Despite himself, he looked up into the heavens. It was still a clear day.

“You found me,” he said modestly, “but why did you tie me up?”

The ram was arranged with its head on a boulder, facing Ray. The rest of it was covered with dirt and brush — or had he sawed off the head, as he’d dreamed of doing to quicken his passage? “Where’s my hat?” He might as well have been addressing the ram for all the response he got.

“You know,” he said, “night’s going to happen, and we’re going to be attacked by something attracted to that. We are.”

“You killed the only thing around here, I think,” Annabel said. “We haven’t seen anything, not even one of those little things that look like chipmunks.”

“You think I killed that? I did not kill that!” These antihunting, antilife freaks, you had to handle them with care. “I found it, I was trying to salvage it. I don’t even have a gun, so how could I have killed it? And even if I had, I would’ve had a perfect right to. People do kill these things, you know, they’ve killed oodles of them.”

“Oodles?” Annabel laughed.

“Hey, yeah.” Ray was a little encouraged.

“Bighorn hunting has been restricted for years,” Alice said. “Last year it was eliminated.” She had arranged two little hummocks of green twigs on either side of the ram’s head.

Ray went back to talking to the pretty one. She was wearing a short shiny red jacket that looked expensive. The other two were dressed like bums. “I have my suspicions concerning the Fish and Wildlife Department,” he said. “I think they’ve been meddling with natural law, you know? I just found this thing. You’re dealing with practically a nonevent here. I just happened upon it, I swear.”

“Wherever you go, there you are,” the pretty one said, and smiled.

“It’s ‘Wherever you go, be there,’ ” Alice said. “Wow, Annabel.”

Ray was sitting on a mat of prickly pear cactus and couldn’t move without getting spiked. He wouldn’t mind seeing Ranger Darling right about now. These girls would get a scolding! The best thing about his situation was that he wasn’t lost. If they would just go away and leave him alone, he’d rally. But there were worse things than being lost. When you were lost, all you had to do was relax and not panic. Being lost was an overrated problem. Ray drifted off. The pretty one, Annabel, was defending her version of the being there business to the crazy one, maintaining that what she’d said was close enough. It was just before dusk. Then there would be dusk. Then night. Day again. The little deaths—las muertes chiquitas—then the big one. It was all practice. Ray stared at the animal thing. With the girls on either side of it, the scene was a perversion of the pictures in the hunting mags where beaming guys and the now and then gal in chocolate-chip camouflage posed with the recently acquired dead. The dead looked relaxed and still handsome but as though they didn’t quite get the occasion. Present, but a world apart from the hoopla. The living looked happy, not that their joy made much sense if examined on a deeper level. He wondered if animals had a sense of las muertes chiquitas too. What had he been thinking when he’d picked that thing up!

“You’ve been talking and talking over there,” Annabel said.

“I must be nervous,” Ray said. “You-all haven’t really hurt anyone before, have you?”

“No,” Alice said. “You’re our practice object.”

“But you’re not going to hurt me,” Ray said.

“We’re just going to leave you here,” Corvus said.

“Alice wants you to know the thing you’ve hurt by turning into it — in your mind,” Annabel explained. “Then you’ll think in a different way and be a better person.”

“The time to do that was before,” Ray protested. “It’s putrefying now, everything’s falling apart in there now, it’s not going to work.”

“What’s not going to work?” Alice said.

Ray didn’t feel so good. He could feel the little monkey’s heart beating wetly beneath its gray skin. The little monkey had stretched its whole scrawny length flat out against him and was wordlessly expressing its situation. It, too, was not lost. It had undergone unnecessary surgery, had painfully recovered from it, had been killed piece by piece and disposed of part by part, and this had been its orbit of eternal occurrence, suffered over and over again. But now it was falling from orbit, it was tensing to bail. The relationship with Ray was drawing to a close, and the little monkey couldn’t care less. But Ray cared. Which he attempted urgently to express, because if the little monkey went, so went Ray. The depth of his sigh surprised him.

“Is this the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Alice was asking him.

“I didn’t do anything!” Ray wasn’t going to tell her about the time he’d tried to shoot an apple off a dog’s head with a pellet gun. It had been that little creep Rocky’s idea, but Rocky could be very persuasive. “Sit,” Rocky had said to the dog, some stray. Almost any dog would sit if you said sit; it was weird, as if they all were tuned to a martyr’s deliverance. He had missed the apple by a mile and was fortunate not to have hit the dog, the dog at that moment being so relative to the apple.

“I don’t feel good,” he admitted. His legs and wrists hurt from being tied in what wasn’t even a proper knot. He knew proper knots from his Cubby days. And this wasn’t one of them. The little monkey was dragging its long self around Ray’s tightening head again.

“Do you want some aspirin?” Annabel asked.

“Annabel,” Alice said, “let him not feel good if he wants.”

Ray believed that if he’d been traveling with a dog none of this would have happened. One of those hybrid wolf pups he’d seen advertised. He’d get a major collar for it, made of heavy, rippling, silver threads, the stuff knights hung around their necks to protect them from arrows.

“I always carry aspirin,” Annabel said. “I have a silver pillbox I keep them in.”

“Annabel,” Alice said, “who taught you to be friendly to everybody you meet?”

It’s breeding, maybe, Ray thought grimly, being brought up properly, and where were you brought up, Alice, he’d like to ask, in penitentiary day care? They had no weapons, as far as he knew — God, keep weapons out of the hands of women! — and at best a pretty muzzy agenda. He hoped they weren’t into disinterested malice, but girls weren’t as a rule, were they?

Annabel popped an aspirin into his mouth.

“Could I have about a half a dozen more?” Ray asked. “And some water?” There was something vaguely quasi-religious to this, even sexual — not at this exact moment, of course, but possibly in a future moment. Three chicks and an American male, bondage and threat, great lawless fun just waiting for the unexpected spark. Three flowerpots waiting for his seed. He was at their mercy and their service. He could do it! He just had to coast out this headache, keep being congenial. I’m shy but I’m hung like a horse, that was the implication he wanted to project. He wanted to shine as a hostage.

But his head felt frail, almost transparent, with the ghostly little monkey now shrunk into a corner. And the monkey was transparent, too, and he could see within it an even smaller monkey. This was a first, the monkey within the monkey within.

“I don’t think he’s well,” Annabel said. “He doesn’t look well.”

He wouldn’t admit he was subject to collapse. He was a stroker, and strokers never admit. When he recovered from the first one, he said the prettiest things. The words he could pluck out of air positively shimmered! He was a poet, a walking I Ching. It was beautiful.

How’s that pancake taste, son? Good?

Burning driftwood indigo!

Want to go for a ride in the car with me, son? I have to get some bread and Modess.

The dilatory are unfortunate even if strong!

But the second episode made him angry and mean. The pretty words left and shitfuckfart arrived, knocking on everyone’s door, the answer to every query. He snarled and flailed in a cave with greasy walls. The world existed to be cursed. Then that passed too, and he cried at everything. When he saw a brimming trash can in the street, when he saw his mother put on lipstick, when someone shook cereal into a bowl. He cried when he slept. Anything would get him started except for another person’s tears. When his mother started to bawl, Ray dried right up. He couldn’t help it, in fact, her tears made him laugh. Clearly, he was placing her under a lot of stress with his random reactions to the varied sampler that was his stroke, or strokes, warmly referred to by his therapists as TIAs, which made the attacks, the incidents, sound modest and unassuming, little wavelets washing prettily over his own personal cell system rather than brain-sucking riptides.

Yet throughout all this buffeting change the little monkey stayed with him and Ray appreciated its fidelity. He also appreciated that it wasn’t a beagle or a bunny, plenty of which also ended up in labs, and he’d have to be insane if he had a bunny or a beagle in his head. The monkey was an acknowledgment and example of science’s beneficial uses. The monkey was a little scary, maybe, but it wasn’t insane. Ray felt it to be naturally intelligent, rather like himself, and similarly unhappy as well.

When, after a few months, the uncontrollable crying stopped, Ray hit the road. He took the money from his father’s fat, worn wallet, the very sight of which would’ve set him to sobbing only a short time before, and cleaned out the silver from the sideboard for hock. Good heavy stuff, it was a service for twelve that was seldom used, which sort of hurt Ray’s feelings since it might have provided some style to the banal and unsavory antistroke diet they all choked down night after night at the kitchen table. What was that pattern called? Winnower. No, it couldn’t have been called Winnower …

He was drooling a little, as though in sleep. He twisted his shoulder forward and rubbed it against his chin.

“Why do you have to have a silver box for aspirin?” Alice was saying. “Why?”

“It’s from Tiffany’s,” Annabel said, “and I love it. I love the inessentials. I wouldn’t want a life without them.” She looked at Ray and smiled.

He made an effort to smile back but didn’t think he’d done it. Maybe they were lezzies, he thought, trekking, mountaineering lezzies and not little flowerpots at all.

“My arms are feeling numb,” he said. “Honest to God. This is tied too tight or something.”

“It’s scarcely tied at all,” Corvus said.

“Corvus,” he mumbled. He liked saying her name. “Corvus, you’ve got a beautiful name, man, it’s as fine as Pythagoras.”

Geometry. Ray had loved geometry before his stroke. He’d had an aptitude for it. Angles, lines, everything sharp and clean. He’d really gotten it. And Pythagoras was so stellar. When Ray was a kid, even before he knew he loved geometry, he’d read one of those big-print kids’ books about heroes — he could see it clearly, its cover was golden — and there was Pythagoras in a flowing robe, and he’d read that Pythagoras thought that in a previous existence he’d been a bush, which was such a stellar thing to admit to thinking.

“Say something else to me, Corvus,” Ray said. “You’re the sensible one here.”

But it was Alice who spoke: “We have to go soon. You have an opportunity to discuss a hunting ethic before we do.” She was fiddling with a knife and fork. For an instant he was anxious that she would poke it into his thigh and begin to carve, then he saw that instead it was a stick she kept snapping ever smaller. Ray rubbed his mouth with his sleeve again. “I have no hunting ethic.”

“That’s my point,” Alice said. “That’s very clear to me.”

I know you from before, he wanted to say, but he said, “The problem is with transients. Transients,” he said emphatically. “The problem is with transients and the chandelier. They don’t know about the chandelier until too late. No, no. Sorry. They know about the chandelier, but they don’t know it’s going to go out.” These three chicks were going to murder him, he thought, but he would talk them out of it. He had built the foundation and now was raising the great structure of his thought. “Whereas in the case of the monkey, the monkey can warm itself by a fire, but it can’t feed a fire, it would never think to feed the fire, but it can take comfort from it. But with the chandelier, everyone knows about the chandelier whether they think about it or not. Everybody — the animals — beneath the chandelier we’re all aware of it together!” Ray felt close to tears. Even the little monkey. Once … it had dazzled.

Alice looked at him. He was as mute as the poor old bighorn. “Why don’t you say something?” she demanded.

Meanwhile, Ray was giving it everything he had. Human beings have language, they are not defenseless. The little monkey slumped in the corner of his head, only its big black eyes seeming alive. It wasn’t impressed by the story of the chandelier. The little monkey was going to renounce all attachment to him, all concern and function, trust and faith. Monkey as Lord, it was just letting him go.

The air was cooling, and the sky unravelling, turning a bizarre peach color.

“Corvus,” Ray said. But he couldn’t really see her, his view blocked by the sheep, which was staring at him maliciously. And the smell was terrible, although it didn’t seem to be coming from as far away as the sheep. It was closer to home, actually, something burning through his own heart’s ventricles, boiling in the fluid-filled cavities of his brain.

“Feed the flock of slaughter,” he said. How long had the three of them been gone? They were gone, he suddenly realized, but they’d made havoc of him. His mind was a sloshing, brimming bowl, and the little monkey was dabbling about in it with long cold fingers, trying to rehabilitate and refresh itself maybe, trying to acquire the strength to go on. That was good, Ray thought distantly. It wasn’t letting him go. His whole head felt like a split coconut, and the little monkey was dabbling around in the spilt thin milk of it. Once Ray had seen a man open a coconut with a machete and had not empathized with it at the time, but now he could — the unliving meat with no plan for itself. His mother protested that the coconut had been opened in a dangerous fashion. The man was large, with a deep dirty tan and a shark tooth wrapped in string around his neck, and he wore a green hat of woven fronds. This was in Florida, a tourist thing, a man opening coconuts outside an open-air aquarium with a sign before each murky pen:

NO WHISTLING OR CLAPPING

NO BABY TALK

He remembered running, prereprimanded among the dark pools.

The monkey continued to push its little hands around Ray’s mind. Ray felt less pain than discomfort, he felt sleepy and softly mauled. Then he became aware that he was swinging his hands from side to side behind him and could touch the end of the rope with his fingers. And then he was free. His hands flopped loose. He dragged them in front of him, rubbed his arms. He was trembling. He wanted to stand up but sensed a considerable gulf between thinking about moving and moving. He rubbed his hands on his knees. I wanted to do that, he thought. He looked at them, he watched his hands cupping his knees. But this isn’t the way getting up is done, it’s done some other way. He pushed his hands down his legs to his boots. The animal grinned at him beneath its curved and broken horns. But I appear unhurt, Ray thought after a time. “Sawdust,” he said, which was horrible for him to hear, for “sawdust” wasn’t the correct word — very seldom the correct word in practically any circumstance.

Ray had always considered himself one balls-to-the-wall puppy. He had thrown himself into the life he’d been given with ardor, ardor, yes, and now he wasn’t even walking upright but just crawling on the ground, creeping over it with no more sense than a snake. His left arm was useless, and his left leg, although possessing more feeling, seemed ambivalent about committing itself to Ray’s purpose. Ray felt no more than a simulacrum of himself humping and rolling and scrabbling down the trail. He knew it was the trail, close to where he’d begun, because it stank and he could see the prints of many soles in the dust. He knew he was alone because he couldn’t feel the little monkey anymore. The little monkey had bailed. He hadn’t entrusted Ray with the packing of the parachute. The little animal — which when new is always holy and unceasing but which in Ray’s case, it’s true, was maimed and neglected and could not be comforted — had finally flown. Ray crept, panting, along the pointed ground. He knew his life had changed.

23

Corvus drove; Alice, as the thinnest, was in the middle. “That was so unsatisfactory,” Alice said. She had yearned blindly for the ontological parry and thrust and was disheartened that this, this victim, she thought dismissively, had been incapable of it. What was wrong with his mouth, anyway? He looked like a crybaby.

Annabel had been afraid for a moment that she’d lost her silver pillbox after giving that boy the aspirin, but here it was again, thank heaven. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, she was thinking, and didn’t know why. They never said, Always a best man, never a groom. This one she could never visualize as a groom, as anybody’s groom. What had Alice wanted with him? She just hadn’t thought the moment through, which was so typical of Alice. Some sort of frontier savagery thing, that was the closest Annabel could come to describing her behavior sometimes, but she wasn’t really savage or even malicious; it was just that if you weren’t rebutting her preposterous sentiments every minute, you’d find yourself — well, not mesmerized, Alice was no mesmerizer, but dismantled or something. Annabel frequently found herself speechless before such blind momentum. Back home, Annabel had played little parts in theater productions, not school ones but civic ones, and she’d been valued, she’d been told she had talent. She had even been in a commercial once — all she’d had to do was look at a package of chewing gum with delight — but out here she felt like a kind of supernumerary.

“I don’t think we should go out so much,” Annabel said. “You’re never going to get me to go camping again.”

“We never went camping,” Alice said.

“That was no hunter, either,” Annabel said. “Please don’t delude yourself.”

“He was sort of pupal, wasn’t he?” Alice realized that he hadn’t killed the animal, but this didn’t concern her overmuch. Evil must be repaid, and not necessarily to the one who’d done the deed. You had to grab whoever was available and annoying and see what came of it, although in this case it hadn’t been much. He had been irritatingly familiar, as though they’d conducted uncompleted business sometime in the past.

“Pupal?” Annabel said. “He was far from cute, but he wasn’t that disgusting.”

“I think you can only do bad things,” Corvus said, “if you forget you’re going to die.”

“Oh,” Annabel said. Corvus made her nervous. How fast were they going, anyway? The Dodge’s speedometer was broken, as well as the gas gauge. The truck was a death trap, and this hair, this Tommy’s hair, was always floating around inside. I would have this vacuumed, she thought, in the most thorough way.

“Remembering you’re going to die lets you do bad things,” Alice said. “Besides, what we did wasn’t bad. We revived him. Lying there with that poor tormented thing all wrapped around him, he could’ve suffocated.” She had seen her first bighorn, but then again, she hadn’t.

Corvus’s hands, green in the dashboard’s light, purled across the wheel. The saguaros waved them on, but at a four-way stop, they paused. Music screamed from a car to the left. Liar fuckin liar ah’m gonna squash you like an insect. The car sped off to the horrid gaieties of town.

“We’re about to reenter,” Corvus said, “the steak and lobster world.”

“I used to love four-way stops as a little kid,” Alice said. “They just fascinated me. I’d kneel in the backseat in awe. I thought it was proof that adults knew what they were doing.”

“We should have listened to him more,” Corvus said. “He was talking in some lost language.”

“I didn’t hear him say much of anything,” Alice said. “As an experiment, he wasn’t very complex.”

“As experiments, we’re all complex,” Corvus said.

Annabel did not consider herself an experiment. She was Annabel née Vineyard, and she was going to do her best to pretend that this year, when it was over, had never occurred.

“Because we’re made for both this life and another one,” Corvus said. “At the same time we have to regard as one this life, the next life, and the life between.”

“The life between?” Annabel exclaimed. “Is that like a so-called life?” That’s where I am, she thought. They passed a large billboard advertising vasectomy reversal services.

“That guy wasn’t up to this kind of thinking,” Alice said.

Who is? Annabel thought.

They pulled into a service station. Corvus gassed up the truck while Alice cleaned the windshield. She liked the overlapping, dissolving lines the squeegee made. Annabel went inside and looked at the magazines. Your Prom looked fascinating. She took it over to the checkout line and stood behind a man with an immense fistula on the back of his neck. It had a little black hole in the center of it as though he were in the habit of trying to locate it with a pin or a pen. What if eternity was like this? Standing behind a huge fistula in an unmoving checkout line with the last copy of Your Prom magazine. She moved over to the other line, but here the customer ahead of her was wearing what appeared to be one of her mother’s suits. She was almost absolutely sure it was her mother’s suit, the cranberry-colored one with the big buttons. The woman was much too large for the suit.

Annabel hurried outside. Dozens of people were gathered beneath the moth-crazed lights, smoking and idly staring. Everything was so busy and ugly, Annabel thought, so inconclusive. She saw Corvus and Alice in the truck, gazing out the windshield at the roiling backdrop. Of course Alice hadn’t cleaned the glass completely, she’d missed whole areas as she always did.

Annabel squeezed in beside them on the truck’s bench seat as some boys walked by and squinted at them appraisingly. What if the three of them ran into that boy again, Annabel wondered, the one they’d tied up? He didn’t seem the kind of boy who would hold a grudge, who’d report or identify them or anything, but it would still be awkward. What would anyone say? Had Alice foreseen such a contingency? No, of course not. She didn’t know about Alice — or even about Corvus, who in her opinion had been rendered practically abnormal by sorrow — but if she ever saw that boy again, she would just die.

24

Hickey was baby-sitting his own child, Mallick, which means “king.” That had been Loretta’s idea, he’d had nothing to say about it; she’d gotten to the birth certificate form first, and after seventy-two hours any changes cost fifty bucks, so Mallick it was. The kid was almost two years old now, but Hickey still hadn’t adjusted to the name and didn’t think he ever would. King, for Chrissakes. He and the kid were driving around after supper. They’d been bacheloring it for three days now, Loretta being off in Minnesota at a wolf howl.

“It’s so beautiful, Hickey,” she’d said when she called to tell him what time to pick her up at the airport. “Hundreds of people all out there silent beneath the stars, you can hear a pin drop, and then the wolves howl and when they’re through, everyone cries, ‘Thank you, thank you!’ and we all applaud. The applause is just thunderous. It’s thrilling.”

He didn’t want to hear about it. He and King had pointedly not been invited on this expedition. Every four months Loretta would leave them for a weekend and go off and do some damn thing involving crowds. Loretta loved crowds. Hickey was more solitary by nature, as he believed was King, with whom, as yet, he had forged no bond.

King sat in his padded car seat studying the scenery as though he found it vaguely inadmissible. Even dressed in lumpish toddler clothes, he had an annoyingly aristocratic air about him. Sometimes Hickey meanly called him Miss Me, which perturbed King not at all.

Also in the car this evening, holding marijuana smoke carefully in his lungs, was Hickey’s friend Kevin, whose lady had left him a week before.

“It was a simple thing,” Kevin had told him. “You know how it started? It started she looks at me one morning, I’m having my beer, and she says, ‘You know how you spell woman, Kevin? It’s “w-o-m-y-n.” That’s how you spell woman, you lazy ugly worthless freak.’ And she was gone. She’d always wanted to open a bakery in Belize, and I suspect she’s down there this very moment. I used to say to her, ‘What kind of ambition is that, running a bakery in Belize? I have more ambition than that.’ ”

Kevin had once published a book of saguaro photographs in which the cacti said funny things befitting their incongruent natures. It was something you’d read sitting on the can. Then he’d published a sequel in which they said additional funny things, but this hadn’t proved as successful. Hickey told him he was belaboring the concept.

“Sometimes I wish Loretta would just leave for good,” Hickey said, “instead of this once-every-four-months thing. Then I could get on with my life.” He looked at his son and nodded significantly. King ignored him.

“You’d miss her if it was permanent. I miss my lady’s sweet buns bad. Maybe I should go down there, get a job in a dive shop, fill air tanks or something. Work my way back into her affection.”

“That’s dangerous work,” Hickey said. “What if you fucked up and somebody’s down there at seventy feet sucking bad air? You’d get sued.” Hickey feared the legal process although he’d never been in a courtroom, never even been called for jury duty. But he had courtroom dreams in which he stood before a robed female who was about to disclose something to him in catastrophic detail.

“You’ve got to know the kairos, Hickey,” Kevin said somberly. He extinguished the roach stub with his fingers and swallowed it.

“What the hell is that?” Hickey said.

“Opportunity. You’ve got to know when opportunity presents itself. You’ve got to be able to recognize it. Like I saw opportunity in these cactus once. I saw economic possibilities, whereas most people wouldn’t necessarily. Now I hate them.”

“I hate ’em, too,” Hickey said. “What the hell time is it, do you know?”

“Time is a provisional thing,” Kevin said. “Hours are an opportunity for human action, nothing more. Do you mind if I light up another joint?”

“Just don’t blow it on King. His mother’ll smell it.”

“Let’s stop and get out,” Kevin said. “What say, King, you talkin’ yet?”

“Nah, he’s not talking. I was trying to get him to start while Loretta was away — would’ve made her feel bad, teach her she just can’t take off like she does because things happen, little milestones that come but once.”

They passed a descanso, a white wooden cross wreathed with faded ribbon, the name of the unlucky decedent spelled out in nails. King, clutching a mouthed rusk in one small hand, gave it a furry look. Hickey downshifted and continued until it was out of sight before stopping. The men got out, but King sat firm.

“Has he smiled yet?” Kevin asked.

“Well, yeah. But he don’t smile much,” Hickey admitted.

“Good-looking boy, though,” Kevin said doubtfully. They passed the joint back and forth. Two shallow arroyos veered down on them in a green V. He wasn’t about to ask if he and Loretta had ever thought of having King checked out. Hickey seemed in a bad mood. And he was in a bad mood too. The saguaros were looking at him as though he cut quite the comic figure out there. It used to be he felt intimate with the giant cacti when he smoked, but now he just wanted to fuck the loony things over. And they were so goddamn big, which Kevin had never found amusing, sensitive as he was to being five feet five and three-quarters without the augmenting lifts in his cowboy boots. When his girlfriend had still been fond of him, she had reassured him by saying that Kant had been only five feet tall and nonetheless a large and successful thinker. Kevin had checked out a synopsis of the shrimp philosopher’s work from the Bookmobile, but little Immanuel seemed pretty dated to him, as well as being confused, a waffler, in fact. That is, did he believe in God, personal freedom, and immortality, or not?

The saguaros, their arms upraised in mock horror, looked as if they were about to fall over from laughing at him.

“Who said paranoia is having all the facts?”

“Hell if I know.” Hickey was brooding about the sort of relationship he and King would have when his son grew up. King might try to kill him; he could see them squaring off in the messy living room. Or King wouldn’t make the attempt himself, he’d think he was too damn smart for that, he’d hire someone to slip into his own father’s home in the middle of the night to dispatch him. Loretta wouldn’t be there, of course. She’d be conveniently absent in some crowd, thousands of witnesses attesting to her presence, and King would have his flunky alibiers lined up, too; but Hickey wasn’t going to allow this to happen, no he wasn’t. He’d survive, and then he and King would have themselves a little talk.

“Somebody said it,” Kevin said.

Then again, maybe he and King would never have their little talk. It could happen. And his life would just be Endure and Evade, over and over. That would be the rhythm of his years. That would be the judgment.

In the truck King sat more or less contentedly, though missing the throaty burble of his father’s Floatmaster muffler — a pleasure that, he knew from experience, would recur once they were on the road again. The sound of the Floatmaster was to King the anthem of the gods.

“You got your shotgun?” Kevin inquired.

“ ’Course. Got both of ’em.”

“Let’s shoot up some saguaros. Look at the arms on that one.” He pointed to a configuration that was annoyingly cosmic.

“Let’s make ’er dance,” Hickey agreed glumly. He went to the truck and removed the guns from beneath a Mexican blanket behind the seats. He hadn’t shot up a sag for some time. “We got to move out a ways. King don’t like loud noise.”

“He’s a sensitive, good-looking boy but you don’t want him getting too sensitive,” Kevin advised.

“Sometimes I think King and I don’t share a common atmosphere,” Hickey said, heartfelt. “And Loretta encourages that.”

“Paranoia’s having all the facts,” Kevin said, sincere. He’d like to carve that on his goddamn hearthstone.

Shooting felt good. Joy consists in this, after all, the increase of one’s power. They walked as though reconnoitering dangerous territory, firing, the green cortex of the cacti spraying like splashed water through the air. Kevin chewed off an enormous branching arm with a half dozen shots and it crashed, wetly splintering, on the ground.

“One of these damn things can kill a man if it falls on him,” Kevin said.

Hickey expressed indignation, although in fact he was feeling better, happy even. The air felt good out here, sort of supple and kind, and he was happy to get away from King’s watchful supereminent gaze. He popped some chain-fruit cholla.

Kevin was feeling better too. He lightly hammered a cactus that appeared to be appealing comically for pardon, but it was just fooling around, it was saying, “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” which was why Kevin had had trouble selling his second edition of Cactus Talk. It all sounded like exceedingly familiar shit.

A plane flew high above them in the perfect sky — Loretta’s plane, no doubt, right on time, dropping down from the north. After Hickey picked her up at the airport, she would want to be taken out to dinner for Indian food from India, a place where people shat and bathed in the same river and worshiped cows. She would have a little pimple on her nose, which always happened when she traveled. She would talk about the wonderful people she’d met. People were nothing special. Didn’t she realize there were five and a half billion people in the world, how could any one of them be special? Think about it, Loretta, for Chrissakes! He hated Indian food. Endure, evade, Hickey mused, firing. He and Kevin were walking farther and farther from the truck and tiny judgmental King. Since their targets weren’t moving at all, they were delighted to see an object fluttering and seething toward them in the twilight. Hickey really couldn’t tell what it was. All push and sprawl, it was so smudged that he couldn’t make the damned thing out. He couldn’t even tell if it was humping toward them or sidling away.

“How do you interpret that, Kevin?” he yelled. But Kevin was firing, having already interpreted it as something inanimate but in motion, inanimate but confident in its effortless ability to succeed without ever having to be alive, an ability that perturbed Kevin. He emptied his shotgun under the pretext of a duty honorably discharged. And Hickey fired too. He had the better gun — his daddy’s, with the shaggy-legged hawk in full plummet etched upon the breach.

Ray didn’t even have the opportunity to see his old friend Pythagoras in the flowing white robes, holding an animal to his mouth to catch his dying breath, for Pythagoras believed that only animals perpetuate spirit. Ray didn’t have the comforting chance to see that. His self merely scattered. Into the lacuna.

25

The television was on again. A startled bull with a ring through its immense nostrils stood in a river. Piranha swirled about. The bull turned gray like a block of chalk, then transparent, and then it was a skeleton, floating away.

Ginger, Ginger, Carter thought, then unplugged the television, turned the screen to the wall, and draped his bathrobe over it.

“Did you buy that stock I’ve been telling you about?” she asked.

“I have not,” Carter said. He decided he was going to be matter-of-fact tonight. No more, no less. Ginger had been urging him to buy a particular stock, insisting upon it, though she’d never shown much interest in the market in the past.

“This is how people get ahead, Carter, through insider information. I’m giving you a tip.”

“Cyberstocks are very tricky, darling. The market’s still sorting itself out.”

“Aren’t you interested in how I know?” she said.

“I wish we’d done this together before,” Carter said. “It would’ve been fun, but under the circumstances I—” Could Ginger have put on a few pounds? Impossible, Carter thought. But there was no doubt about it, she had become a little hippy.

“What are you looking at?” she snapped.

“Thinking,” he said, “just thinking.”

“It’s going to be instant gratification with this stock, I assure you.”

“People who want instant gratification get clobbered by the market. This sounds very similar to the biotechnology craze just a few—”

“Don’t try to educate me, Carter. I can’t believe you still have a long-term horizon.”

Long-term horizon? She certainly had been talking to someone. “Why not?” he asked cautiously.

“Have you rearranged this room?” Ginger demanded. “You have, haven’t you? You’ve done something with the mirror.”

He looked guiltily at the mirror, which Donald had moved only a few days before. “You never should have a mirror that reflects your image in bed, Mr. Vineyard,” Donald had told him. “A mirror that reflects your body while sleeping causes unnatural dream states and a weakening of physical vitality.”

Carter got a kick out of Donald calling him Mr. Vineyard. It was getting to be a little joke between them.

“The entire room looks different,” Ginger said, annoyed. “Is it that dolt Donald’s doing? You’ll be hanging crystals in the windows next! You’ll be putting baskets filled with feathers in the corner.” Her wide hips moved her fluidly from one side of the room to the other while she ranted about Donald. She was looking astonishingly well nourished, Carter thought with dismay. She wasn’t fading away at all.

“You’ve moved the lights around as well! It’s much dimmer in here.”

Donald had told Carter that due to overbright bulbs, the bedroom was an extraordinarily unstable environment.

“Have you ever heard of bagua, darling?” Carter ventured. “Feng shui?”

“I cannot believe this!”

Empty vessels make the most noise, Carter thought. Maybe this is what that meant.

“It’s just an idea,” he said, trying to be conciliatory.

“I know what it is, for godssakes, and it’s an Oriental idea. Carter, you’re becoming a flake. You were always dull and predictable and rational and money-oriented, and to hear you now — well, it’s pathetic.”

“My journey has changed,” Carter said, “as has yours.” He felt a little giddy talking to Ginger like this. Butting heads, as it were.

“Do you intend to marry Donald?” she said.

“Why would Donald want to get married?” He hastened to add, “What a preposterous notion.”

“Has he suggested a hot-air balloon ride yet?”

“No,” Carter said. Skimming over the desert peaks and valleys in a colorfully patterned balloon with Donald … the idea had come up. Casting off at dawn. Elevating with the rising sun. Champagne, a few silly sandwiches. Maybe on his birthday.

Ginger pulled her hair around in front of her face in a vaguely familiar gesture and peered at the ends. “I’m letting my hair grow,” she said. “Don’t you love it?”

Carter put his head in his hands.

“Passion was never your forte,” Ginger went on. “Your member was adequate, but your lovemaking lacked élan. Admit it, Carter. You preferred making money.”

“Darling, it’s so late,” Carter said from behind his hands. “Isn’t it late?”

“Why don’t you look at your little clock?” she suggested.

Carter looked around the room, which Donald had quite transformed. Where was the clock? Ginger was taking exceptional satisfaction in its absence. His minor losses and setbacks clearly won her complete approval. Ginger was mean, she was so mean. She was aggressive, destructive, and bored, a pyramid of seemingly indestructible neuroses. No way was he going to buy that stock. He would stand firm on this one, appeal to her snobbishness. Did she want to use the opportunity she’d been given, in what was a stunning reversal of nature’s laws — to indulge in common necromancy? If only she’d make some friends there. Surely the dead had their fascinations. But Ginger hadn’t been at all interested in or moved by the dead even when she was alive.

“Carter?” she resumed. “Do you know what I’d like for Christmas?”

That was a hard one.

“Don’t look at me all agley like that, Carter.”

“I was considering giving Annabel some pearl earrings,” he said.

“Annabel …” Ginger said. “Oh, Annabel. I hope you’re not planning on giving her my pearl earrings.”

“She’d treasure them, darling,” he said without much hope.

“Don’t even think about it.” Ginger seemed to be examining her hair again.

“Christmas is quite a ways off,” Carter said. “It’s summer here. It was one hundred ten degrees here today.”

“ ‘Here?’ ” she scoffed. “I’m quite aware of where you are, Carter, and it doesn’t impress me one bit. In any case, Christmas will be upon you before you know it, and what I want for Christmas is you.”

“Me?”

“You’re so tedious tonight, Carter. So self-absorbed. What do you think I’d want — a rosebush?” She laughed unpleasantly. “People who think they can get away with planting a goddamn memorial rosebush are beneath our contempt.”

“You shouldn’t want anything now, darling, least of all me.”

“You’re a shadow of what you used to be, Carter, it’s true. We both have to admit it.”

“Darling, I’m simply going to have to say good night now.” He was in a panic of exhaustion.

“Darling,” she said. “Darling, darling, darling, darling. You’re wearing the goddamn word out. I wish I’d had a bodyguard. He could’ve gone to restaurants with us and had sense enough to recommend shell steaks and yogurt with peaches to soak up all the booze we drank. If the place didn’t have shell steaks and yogurt with peaches, he would’ve escorted us elsewhere. He would’ve been forthright, with a big sunny grin. He’d wear blue suits unabashedly. He’d be strong. He’d instinctively know what I needed. He’d be protective and adept—”

Ginger was working herself up to quite a pitch. Then there was a queasy retinal flash and she was gone.

Carter wandered out to the kitchen. He recalled a friend of his who claimed his wife had left him after the doctor had changed her anti-depression medicine. That’s all it took. Why hadn’t Ginger’s doctor been more enterprising? He wondered if he should tell Donald about Ginger. The only thing the young man knew was that she was dead, which normally would have been enough. Should he confide in Donald? He could see the boy’s handsome, thrillingly unresponsive face. Donald might say, “Consider, Mr. Vineyard …” Donald frequently prefaced the laying out of parameters in this manner. Consider. What a remarkable, elegant word, Carter thought, the way Donald said it. He poured himself a drink.

26

Sherwin was eating lunch at one of his favorite neighborhood establishments. The building had been conceived as a bank, but the bank had failed. Now it was a restaurant whose intentions were difficult to determine. He and Alice were sitting in an enclosed patio that once had offered the convenience of a drive-up window. A striped awning hugged the area, altering the hue of flesh and food alike. Each table had a card propped among the condiments (the ketchup looked quite green) stating YOU’RE NOT GOING COLOR-BLIND! OUR NEW AWNING CAUSES THIS EFFECT! PEACE!” Sherwin was eating pasta primavera. Oil glistened on his chin. Alice, opposite him, hadn’t said anything for some minutes.

“You ever notice that I got a glass eye?” Sherwin asked.

“No,” Alice said.

“Pretty interesting, huh?”

“No,” Alice said. “You don’t have a glass eye. Both of them move.”

“That’s because it’s on a coral fragment. There’s a real piece of coral back there that the muscles are attached to, so it can swing around a little bit. A little piece of coral from America’s only living reef tract off Marathon, Florida.”

“You can’t take coral in the Florida Keys,” Alice said. “It’s a crime. A felony.”

“A felony!” Sherwin said.

“A misdemeanor, then. It should be a felony.”

“My God, she’d deprive me of an eye.”

“If you don’t have an eye and you put in something that looks like an eye, it doesn’t seem like the you I know. The you I know would want a big hole behind dark glasses, or you’d want an eye that looked like a tattooed egg.”

Sherwin grinned at her. “Surely you didn’t say a tattooed egg.”

“One of those eggs, you know, it starts with an F.”

“Fabergé.”

“Right. Fabergé.”

Sherwin stopped grinning. He looked down at his plate and pushed it away, then picked up a cigarette he’d left burning in the ashtray.

“Coral is alive, you know,” Alice said fretfully. “The coral reef is like an underwater forest, and a variety of marine life depends on—”

“I’m ordering some buffalo wings and sweet potato fries. The sweet potato fries are good here, you want some?”

“Why do they call them buffalo wings?”

“The term is supposed to connote whimsical fantasy, Alice.”

“That is so offensive. In less than a hundred years, Americans reduced the quintessential animal of the continent by ninety-nine-point-nine percent. Only twenty-three remained when—”

“Alice, have some fries.”

“Do you know that more than forty percent of our food has been genetically altered?” she said wearily, then gazed at the iced tea before her. Everything was big in this place, enormous. There must have been a quart of it in a disgusting pink plastic glass.

When had she fallen out of love with him? Sherwin wondered. For about two weeks, he could’ve asked her to do anything and she would’ve. That was love, wasn’t it? He’d thought he had all the time in the world to decide what to do with her. She’d amused him, repelled him. Women had always repelled him, they were whiskered slits, irresponsible, barbaric, they’d eat you alive. In dreams, he’d embrace a woman and turn into a pillar of blood.

“So when did you stop being crazy about me?”

Alice blushed. “I’m crazy about you. Why did you say you have a glass eye when you don’t?”

“I was just making conversation,” Sherwin said. “But since you’re not crazy about me anymore, why don’t you tell me what you wanted from me in the first place?”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Alice said. “I just wanted to be with you, like now.” She looked around at their surroundings, at the two loud women sitting nearby. They had poured sugar on their food so they wouldn’t eat anymore.

“So I went out to get the blower fixed,” one was saying. “It’s under warranty and they’ve moved — there’s an arrow on the door that says ‘Moved two miles down the road’—so I drive two miles down the road and there’s this hacienda-style house, though modest, with a tile roof and a center courtyard, and I go in to pick up the goddamn blower which has been nothing but trouble and I say, ‘What is this, a house?’ and they say, ‘This is Tarzan Zambini’s house!’ and I say, ‘Who the hell is Tarzan Zambini?’ and it turns out he was a lion tamer with the circus and he retired out here with his lions and they lived on one side of the house and Tarzan lived on the other and there was a swimming pool between them and the lions would swim in the pool, they loved it, but Tarzan had to move out and give up his lions when the highway went through. There he was out in the middle of nowhere with his lions, and comes progress’s inexorable wheel to slice his spread in half, and now there are these stupid lawn mowers where the lions used to play.”

“Where’d Tarzan move to?”

“I think he just passed on. Where’s a person going to move to if he’s used to having lions? Most garden apartments that are affordable and safe, who’d accept an odd old fellow like Tarzan? Probably wouldn’t even let him have a clothesline.”

“I hate to differ with you, Vivian,” her friend said, “but they’d allow him a clothesline if it weren’t visible from the street.”

Alice was ambivalent about the fate of Tarzan Zambini. Was it deserved or not?

The wings had arrived with the sweet potato fries. Sherwin was wearing his tuxedo. His fingers were greasy. Watching him had given Alice much pleasure in the past, but now she felt nothing. Would she forever be an empty onlooker at the feast of life? She shook her iced tea, and it spilled a little. She ate some bread.

“That’s a famous painting,” Sherwin said.

A wall was devoted to the glaring thing. “Famous?”

“It’s a reproduction of a famous painting. The Icebergs.”

“I like it,” Alice acknowledged, “but I don’t think it belongs here. It doesn’t seem suitable decor. It’s like the owner’s too cheap for air-conditioning. Not that I approve of air-conditioning.”

“You know why you like it? Because there aren’t any people in it. There’s a funny story about the painting. See the tiny little mast in the corner?”

“There’s food on it, I think.” The work had not escaped spillage.

“That’s the crow’s nest from a wrecked ship. The artist’s name was Church, a famous landscape painter a century ago, but when he exhibited The Icebergs, no one exclaimed over it. The reaction was so reserved that Church lugged the painting back to his studio and painted in that tiny little smashed-up crow’s nest to give it a little human dimension, see what I’m saying? Like, man was here, even though he was destroyed, he got to see this cold, immense, monumental thing and was ennobled by his very inconsequentiality before it.”

“Did they like it any better after he put the wreck in it?” It was the smallest of corrections, Alice noted.

“The public? No, flotsam and jetsam didn’t do it for them. Flotsam and jetsam just reminded them of their own paltry selves, that they were tramps and drifters and vagrants in this life, nothing more. The public hated the painting. Church was crushed. Frederic Edwin Church. Of the luminist school.” He regarded Alice thoughtfully. She was sexless but troubling. He wanted to go away and then send for her, that’s what he wanted. He wanted to leave and have her follow. We are in exile here. We are strangers and pilgrims in this place. Two on a party, a solitude of two. He wanted to twist her to him.

“Note the cruciform shape,” Sherwin said. “It’s a very persistent symbol. The symbol of symbols. The cross represents a way out; it moves, renews, implies further voyaging. But Church used it cynically. The painting disappeared. It got lost for one hundred and sixteen years. Then it was found. In some stairwell at a school for bad boys.”

“Why not bad girls?” Alice said. She was listening to a story that wasn’t true, maybe, a story that could still be altered. Annabel had told her not to encourage him by believing him.

Sherwin laughed. “Bad girls! They would’ve torn it apart with their long, painted nails. They would’ve wanted to see it burn. It was a kind providence that kept it out of the bad girls’ school.”

“Well, what did the bad boys do to it?”

“They didn’t harm it, except for one bad boy who signed it.”

“That’s nice!” Alice exclaimed. “What happened to him?”

“Forget him, he’s dead by now. Don’t you want to belong to me?”

Alice took a swallow of her iced tea. It tasted like the smell in Fury’s ears. Some of these herbal teas went too far.

The waiter came up. “Impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake,” he said. “You want anything else? A nice mud pie?”

“Maybe my wife does,” Sherwin said.

The waiter looked at her, amused. Alice reddened and shook her head.

“Naw, that’s it then.” Sherwin took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and gave it to the man, who wore white clinging plastic gloves.

“Have a nice remainder of the rest of your life,” the waiter said. “Gotta cough.” He turned away.

Sherwin shook his head. “The last act begins inauspiciously.”

“I don’t get this place,” Alice said.

“That’s because you’re a child of the dominant culture.”

“I’m nobody’s child,” Alice said.

“We won’t come here anymore.”

“Good.”

“Sometimes I prefer the haunts of criminals, but sometimes I like to avoid them too.”

Alice glanced at the two women. They were sprinkling more sugar on their food just to make sure. Tarzan Zambini had been dismissed.

“No criminals patronize this place,” Alice said.

“Just you and me.”

“I wish,” Alice said fervently.

Outside, a man in harlequin rags was screaming at the empty street, declaiming against a world that cared a great deal less than he imagined.

“Yeah,” Sherwin said, “you and me.”

Alice nibbled more bread.

“What are you going to do about that tooth?”

“I’m getting an oral implant,” she said guiltily.

“You’ll be tracked down through your teeth. You won’t be able to call your life your own.”

“I don’t have a Social Security number,” Alice said.

“I thought you were going to unhinge things. You don’t need perfect teeth for that.”

“I never even had a cavity before,” Alice said.

“Soon you’ll be getting bone-density scans. Time goes by like this.” He snapped his long fingers. “But still, I want to confess something to you. I never intended to live this long. You want to cuddle with me in a bathtub?”

It didn’t sound wholesome. “Sure,” Alice said. “But you don’t have a bathtub.” She remembered that there was no tub where he lived; instead, a shower stall of that somewhat flexible consistency.

“You know anyone with a tub?” Sherwin lit another cigarette, and his hand shook a little. He’d tried it before. There were names for people like him. Attempters. Parasuicides. He preferred Attempter. If you were successful, you were called a Completer, although they avoided the word successful. He’d known guys … Larry, a Completer if ever there was one. He’d gone out in the most beautiful leather coat. None of them had known he even owned such a thing. It was unborn calf, or some buttery, ineffable creature. Larry had employed pills and Absolut, and what a presentation their Larry had made: fresh haircut, pedicure, a dash of glitter on his eyelids, Purcell playing over and over on his distinguished audio system. Cave, Cave, Dominus videt … Larry had actually thought God was watching!

“How about your friend Corvus? She got a tub we could borrow? She’s always seemed mystical and pessimistic to me. It’s an intriguing combination.”

“You and Corvus should never ever meet,” Alice said.

“What do you mean? We’ve met.”

“You can’t talk to her this way, the way we’re talking, this I-love-you stuff, this words-are-just-noise stuff, this bathtub stuff.”

“You know to what I allude,” Sherwin said. “This is wonderful for me.”

“You’re kind of like a disease,” Alice said sincerely, “an immunizing disease, which I like. But Corvus, no, no, no.”

“An immunizing disease,” Sherwin said.

“Corvus is … I don’t want you to talk about Corvus.” She stood up. “I want to go.”

The horrible waiter reappeared, seemingly transfixed by the sight of them together. Sherwin looked at The Icebergs on the way out. There was something on it, Alice had been right, not food itself but the stains of food. The crow’s nest really was a nice touch — a little desperate, of course, but Sherwin had always found the shape of a cross to be pleasing. The cross was the symbolic image of death, a death distinguished from mere biological anonymity, a death surrounded by an aura of hope and uncertainty.

Out in the street, the man in the harlequin clothes was screaming, “The word God shits some people’s minds!”

“The word would be shut,” Sherwin said to him mildly. “Don’t you mean shuts?”

27

Emily Bliss Pickless lived with her mother, whose most recent boyfriend was a man named John Crimmins. They had met at a gun range, where Emily’s mother met most of her boyfriends, although she made herself a rule of never double-dipping them. Emily’s mother thought this John Crimmins was “darkly intelligent.” Emily did not share this opinion, but she didn’t mind him. When he wasn’t around, she didn’t miss him either.

The first thing he told Emily in confidence was that he might be the Son of God. “It’s a hypothesis I’m checking out,” he said. “I got the same initials, don’t I?” He grinned at her. He thought Emily was as dumb as is.

“I could never be the Son of God,” Emily said, not caring much.

“No, you couldn’t,” John Crimmins agreed.

He had many things he didn’t like, whole lists of them, and urged Emily to be equally discriminatory in her life, though he warned her against adopting his particulars. Emily didn’t like him enough to adopt his particulars. J.C. didn’t like mayonnaise, dogs, or beer in cans.

“Why don’t you like dogs?” Emily had asked.

“Do you know anything about the Son of God?”

“Not much,” Emily admitted.

“He was nailed to a cross of wood and left to die hanging in the air.”

“Well, I know that,” Emily said. “Everyone knows that.” To most people, it was the most compelling part of the story. She also had heard that he had come back, been resurrected, which she found extremely revolting, repugnant, and impossible.

“What else do you know?” J.C. demanded. He was sitting hunched over the breakfast table watching some cereal turn the milk blue. Her mother was still asleep.

In the first few weeks of their acquaintance, Emily had pretended that she didn’t know how to read. She’d ask him what signs said, billboards, magazine covers, newspaper headlines, and the like, and he’d always render them incorrectly. He’d change only one word sometimes but often entirely alter the meaning. They’d amused themselves each in their own way in this manner, for some time. Emily didn’t think he’d ever caught on.

“Nothing else,” Emily said. “I forget.” You had to act dumb around adults, otherwise there was no point in being around them at all.

“When the Son of God died, there wasn’t any of him left to bury. Even his bones disappeared. Every last scrap of him vanished. Do you know the whys and wherefores of that?”

Emily shook her head ever so slowly back and forth. Her mother lacked all discrimination when it came to men.

“The dogs took everything. The dogs that were always hanging around crucifixions. The crucified hung there as food for dogs, grim pickings for dogs. The reason the Son of God disappeared from the tomb was that he was never in the tomb, he was in the bellies of dogs. And to this day, you know, a dog will eat you. If you’re in a room with a starving dog and you’re powerless for some reason or another, he’ll eat you.”

“Not if he likes you, he won’t,” Emily offered.

“Likes you,” J.C. snorted. “Even if he loves you, he will.”

Emily’s mother walked into the kitchen. She looked at Emily as if she didn’t know how she had gotten there for an instant, but then she looked pleased. Though her mother loved her dearly, this was a way she often looked at her after the separation of some hours, particularly night’s hours. Emily didn’t mind it much, feeling like a little flower that had just come up to everyone’s surprise.

“Another thing that I don’t like,” J.C. went on, “is other people’s soaps.”

“You haven’t been using my duck and chick soap, have you?” Emily had her own tinctured soap, which she didn’t like using as their distinctive shapes would be blurred if she did. Because of this reluctance, Emily’s person was always somewhat soiled. “Mom, don’t let him use my soap.”

“J.C. wouldn’t touch your soap, honey,” her mother said, and yawned.

J.C. and Emily watched her yawn hugely. Emily was worried that one day her jaw would lock open like a sprung door, and there they’d be: her mother wouldn’t be able to work, and Emily pictured them wandering around in rags, begging, a little veil over her mother’s mouth to keep people from pitching coins in and keep the bugs out.

“I hate watching you wake up,” J.C. said. “Woke up you’re a fine, delightful, good-looking woman, but your waking up is a process I don’t believe any man should be subjected to.”

Holding her hands in front of her mouth and still yawning, her mother retreated back into the bedroom.

“She should take medicine or something for that,” J.C. said.

“So is that the only reason you don’t like dogs?”

“Isn’t that enough of a reason? I’m telling you something historically accurate. Dogs have been getting away with too much for too long.”

“Have you ever bitten anyone?” Emily asked. “I wish I could bite someone whenever I felt like it.”

“You look like a biter,” J.C. said. “You feel like biting me?”

But Emily demurred.

“Come on, come on.” The arm J.C. extended had black hairs growing on it up to the elbow, where they abruptly stopped. “Not everyone would allow you this opportunity.”

Emily continued to demur, suspecting that if she did sink her teeth into his arm, he’d swat her across the room and right into the boneyard. She had things to do in this life, although she was unsure as to what they were.

28

We must see things we do not see now,” Nurse Daisy would say off and on throughout the day, “and not see things we see now.” Alice was assisting the nurse in the bathing of poor Fred Fallow, who weighed close to 350 pounds and had to be hoisted into the tub via block and tackle. Her duties were to scrub him with a long wandlike stick.

“I always think when I do this,” Nurse Daisy said, operating the lift, “of a dolphin being moved to its new home in an aquarium. I saw a picture of it in a magazine once. How you doing there, good boy? How’s the warm water feel on the old bottom, Freddie? How’s it feel on the old tush?”

Freddie gave a piercing, strangulated cry.

“Upsy, downsy, back and forth, looking good, Freddie,” Nurse Daisy crooned as she feathered the gears and swished Freddie back and forth through the water. “Isn’t water a remarkable element? It’s exempt from getting wet. It’s as exempt from getting wet as God is exempt from the passion of love.”

“I’ve heard that,” Alice said, working the brush. “The first half anyway, somewhere.” Sherwin, probably, who admired exemptions in general.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Nurse Daisy said. “Thoughts are infusorial.”

When she had first made the nurse’s acquaintance, Alice wondered why she wasn’t working in rehabilitation since she was so strong and tireless in exhorting her lumpen charges, but each time Alice assisted her, it became clearer why she wasn’t. Nurse Daisy had more grim homilies about a bland, absentminded God than Alice had ever heard, and she poured them enthusiastically into the ears of those without hope. God had the maternal instincts of an alligator in regard to its spawn, was Nurse Daisy’s opinion. By effort and good works ye are not saved. It was hopeless to struggle, hopeless to strive. We live and die like little seeds that come to nothing.

She swished the moaning Freddie back and forth while Alice daubed worriedly at his back with the brush. The nurse was stout and sallow with a melodious voice, and hair the softness of concertina wire. Nurse Daisy did not cohere — her personal characteristics were at once pronounced and very much at odds with one another. There was even the possibility that she actually believed she loved the hapless souls gathered beneath her cold and comfortless wing.

Alice had a little theory about the soul that she was somewhat loath to share, as certain of her theories had been discredited in the past. For example, when Alice was a child, she had believed the sex of a baby was determined by the one who’d tried hardest in the making of love; girls were made by women who concentrated, and boys when the woman wasn’t quite paying attention. Concerning the soul, she had tentatively concluded that when someone ended up in this waxed and fluorescent way station that was Green Palms, his or her soul was still searching for the treasure meant for it alone. But the search had gone on just a shade too long. The soul didn’t know where it was, only that it was in the place where the treasure meant for it alone would never manifest itself. As a tentative conclusion, Alice had to admit this wasn’t much, and there were several large issues it didn’t address at all. Still, there had to be an explanation as to why some people ended up being tenured to death for so long without being dead.

“Birth is the cause of death,” Nurse Daisy liked to say, which is why they didn’t allow her to fill out the death certificates either, although she once had scribbled, “The set trap never tires of waiting,” and, since no one could decipher her handwriting, it sailed on through.

Nurse Daisy dragged and bobbled Freddie around in the tub. “Makes you feel like a little baby, doesn’t it, Freddie? Dawdling and dandling in here with all your life before you, which is why you can’t remember it.” She turned to Alice, “More suds, dear, please.”

Alice hauled in the brush and foamed it up with a bar of Ivory. She had been unsuccessful in her attempts to convince Nurse Daisy to eschew the use of Ivory.

“They test all their products on animals,” Alice had told her. “I could provide you with some very disturbing and convincing brochures.”

“Ivory soap is the madeleine of our country’s innocence,” Nurse Daisy said. “No one can resist the evocative smell of Ivory on a bit of clothing or human skin, most exquisitely on bed linen. The smell draws one toward trees and earth, silken dough rising, rain in the early morning. The numbing weight of infrastructure, franchises, seven hundred channels — all is lifted from us with its purifying scent.” She fluttered her small, coarse hands Heavenward.

“Ivory soap’s parent company is responsible for the death of fifty thousand animals annually,” Alice said.

“Our capacity to do evil has nothing to do with our innocence,” Nurse Daisy said. “Honestly, dear, sometimes you sound as though you just fell off the turnip truck.” She gave Freddie a quick two dunks. “Whoopsie and whoopsie! Peekaboo! Here you are again!”

When Alice had first started coming here, Freddie would say, “I want to go hoooome,” just like they all did, but he didn’t say it anymore. The management explained to Corvus and Alice that the residents didn’t really want to go home, they just wanted things to be the same as they once had been. The distinction had to be made. Home didn’t have anything to do with it, they assured Alice and Corvus.

“Where’s your friend today?” Nurse Daisy asked.

“Which one?” she said.

“The only one you have. When I was your age, I only had one friend, too. We were girls together.”

“She’s assisting Nurse Cormac,” Alice said.

“Nurse Cormac was born with a wimple. I hate her pious guts. No balls. Timidest person I ever met. Feckless do-gooder. Simpleton.” She spoke without excitement.

Alice daubed Freddie unhappily. He was very old, inert, massive, and alive.

“You ever drown anyone doing this?” Alice said.

“Would they allow me to continue if I had?” She reeled Freddie in a bit.

“Well, I don’t know,” Alice said. “Don’t you think he’s clean enough now?”

Nurse Daisy pretended to look at a watch on her wrist, although Alice had never seen her wear one. “Still possible for your circle to close today, Freddie. Still some time left in the day for the circle to do the right thing. But the circle closes in its own good time, doesn’t it, Freddie? Can’t rush your secession into dust, the evaporation of your little droplet above the sea …” She had hoisted Freddie up and away from the tub and was keeping him more or less upright on a padded vinyl trolley. “Towels, please, dear,” she said to Alice.

With relief, Alice swaddled Freddie up. A soapy smell rose from his pale, globe-shaped head. Innocence. Incomprehension.

“There’s my little bunny,” Nurse Daisy said.

Someone screamed, and Alice blinked.

“Nothing serious,” Nurse Daisy said. “I know my screams.”

Alice frowned.

“You think I’m adding a teeny tiny bit to their suffering, don’t you?” the nurse said. “But no one consciously suffers here. That’s the tragedy of this place. All this remarkably calibrated suffering and not a bit of consciousness involved.”

Nurse Daisy dried Freddie and dressed him in a blue sweatshirt (“Iowa Hawkeyes today, Freddie”), a diaper and red sweatpants. She regarded her handiwork with a very complicated expression, an expression Nurse Cormac couldn’t have achieved if it had been painted on her. She stroked Freddie’s vigorously rampant eyebrows flat with her finger. The flesh around her simple gold wedding band was swollen. She should have that thing cut off and enlarged, Alice thought.

“Do you go home to a husband?” Alice inquired. She couldn’t imagine.

“I’m sure your own story is far more intriguing. Do you get credits for coming here? Points?”

“I don’t think so,” Alice said.

“Complicado, our impulses. The tubies, dear, for Freddie’s feet.”

Alice ripped open a fresh package of tube socks. She knelt and pulled the white socks over the large feet, which were sadly warm, and bloused the sweatpants over them. Secreted beneath his skin just below the breastbone was a battery that kept his weary heart beating wantonly. It had been implanted when the subject of his future was still coming up. A majority of the tenants of Green Palms were so implanted. Nurse Daisy called the apparatus the Devil’s little lamb. She called the socks toddling tubies for negotiating the chasm — the chasm, as Alice understood it, being the divide between life and death, although in this place the chasm had shrunk to a crack, even less than a crack, a crease, something technical and maladroit that people here couldn’t manage to fall into.

Freddie had a daughter who came to visit, and she was sixty-six, but Alice hadn’t seen her for a while.

They wheeled Freddie out of the scrub room into the main corridor, then down to an enclosed patio where they deposited him with three silent, similarly swaddled denizens. The patio faced the arbor where the employee of the month was entitled to park. All month a dented car painted with flowers, childish pansies, and petunias had been parked there. It belonged to Nurse Cormac, who frequently was awarded this honor.

“No daisies, you’ll notice,” Nurse Daisy said, “a quite conscious omission.”

“You ever get to park your car in that slot?” Alice asked.

Nurse Daisy ignored this absurdity, though she did snort softly through her delicate nostrils, another anomaly on her blocky, unbalanced face. The repertoire, if not the mobility, of her features seemed endless.

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. Vexed, 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

Mom, if J.C. moves in here, I’m moving out,” Emily said. “Don’t be silly,” her mother said. “He’s not moving in, he has his own place. He used to live in the country, but now he has a little bungalow in town.” She was changing the vacuum cleaner bag, the swollen, filled one dribbling dirt on the floor. Emily thought it would be appropriate for her mother to say, “Don’t be silly, you can’t move out, you’re eight years old. You are my little bunny, my little bear, my little moonslip. You need your mommy to take care of you. You need your mommy to put fresh sheets on the bed, pour you milk, buy you notebooks and pencils and such, buy you new white sneakers.…” But her mother said no such thing. She struggled with the vacuum bag, which continued to spill dense gray matter over the already grubby floorboards. Emily had heard that some people, when they died, turned into something like this, bones and all, but she didn’t believe it. How could you believe something like that?

“You’re supposed to change that when it’s no more than two-thirds full,” she said. “Otherwise, you’ll damage the machine. Stewart, my colleague at school, the one who’s retarded and likes to vacuum, he told me that.”

“You don’t have colleagues, you have classmates,” her mother said. “Where does all this shit come from? Take it out to the garbage can for me, Emily.”

Emily carried the item out with a measured, exaggerated step. In case anyone was watching, it was best to appear that you were involved in a matter requiring great skill. A single enormous container, much taller than Emily, served the needs of the alley. She never understood why her mother often failed to take in the whole picture — in this case, how could Emily accomplish the task with which she was presented when she was only four feet high?

People weren’t supposed to place dangerous materials in the container, but its enormity encouraged laissez-faire. People were not supposed to put batteries in it or pesticides or paints or used oil, but people did, they did. Emily knew her own mother was guilty in that regard. She’d turn her in to the authorities, except she doubted they would know what to do with her. You were supposed to wait! You were supposed to keep your unwanted lifestyle toxins until Amnesty Day, which she’d attended twice in her brief life. Responsible people drove their cars in a solemn procession to an unnaturally smooth, dome-shaped hill out by the interstate highway. Attendants in white plastic suits and red gloves accepted the toxins and placed them in long container trucks. No one smiled. No one said thank you. Somebody once tried to dispose of a newborn baby, but someone else heard it crying and piping in a bag and that had almost been the end of Amnesty Day. You had to be careful what you called things because some people would just take advantage. People were too literal. Someone brought a bald eagle, a bald eagle utterly entire, shot straight through its big yellow eyeballs with an arrow. The eagle didn’t cause that much of a fuss, however, whereas some hundred people had come out of the woodwork wanting to adopt the infant. The reason a child was so popular simply because he had been plucked out of a dump eluded Emily.

She placed the bag of vacuumed dust by the great imposing cart’s wheels, pretending she was propitiating it. Not that it had ever given her anything, but she couldn’t help but have hope in waiting. Her colleagues at school were always telling about the wonderful items they found. One girl, Lucy, had found a parakeet and brought it home, and now it sang and looked at itself in the mirror and had only colored comics on the floor of its cage and everything.

Emily returned to the house with strides as long as her short legs could provide, still highly aware of being observed. Houses only looked empty. They were never empty.

Her mother was noisily banging the vacuum cleaner into corners.

“It doesn’t seem to be doing the job, does it?” Emily noted.

Her mother turned it off. “J.C.’s coming over for supper, honey. Try to be nice.”

“What are we going to have to eat?”

“Presentation is more important to J.C. than the food itself. Isn’t that interesting? When he told me that, I thought: That’s an interesting way to deal with the food problem.” Emily’s mother’s archenemy was the recreational calorie.

“So what are we going to have?” Emily asked.

“Something … flamboyant,” her mother said.

“You’re not going to try and masquerade cow again, are you?” Emily said. “You know neither J.C. nor I eat cow. You’re always trying to slip me cow. From when I was a little baby.”

“You’d never know it was cow,” her mother said. “Oh, I’m just kidding. I’m making raspberry chocolate cake.”

“I don’t think that’s adequate for supper,” Emily said. “I think I need more nourishment than that.”

“You are such an old lady, Emily, honestly.”

“I’m not receiving adequate nourishment. I want to be tall — a little over seven feet tall.”

“I know you don’t care for it when I’m frank, Emily, but you’re not going to be tall. Your father wasn’t tall. He wasn’t stupid, but there was one thing about him and that was that he was short, quite exceedingly short. I’m not saying he was malformed, honey, just short.”

Her father, over the years, had gotten progressively smaller. He was shrinking fast, though he’d been holding at jockey size for the last month or so.

“We’ve got to have more than cake for supper,” Emily said.

“Stained-glass faux veal loaf,” her mother said. “How does that sound for tonight? Fresh colorful seasonal vegetables providing the stained-glass effect.”

Emily knew her gullibility was being tested again and wished her mother would respect her intelligence. Most likely it would just be another bean-and-burrito night from Food for Here and There. Emily would be required to ride down for the burritos, risking her life on a bicycle path dominated by Rollerblading women pushing tricycled hooded strollers containing the next generation, women who would hesitate or veer for no one. Her mother would serve the burritos on plastic plates. Lately she’d been pouring J.C.’s beer into a glass for him and she didn’t put the milk carton on the table anymore. That was about it for presentation.

“Mom, do you know bats eat bats sometimes?”

Her mother scratched her on top of the head as though she were a pet. Indeed, though hardly freakish, Emily was about pet size.

“You’ve got so much sand in your hair! What do you do, just pour it on your head?”

Sometimes she did. Personally, she liked the feel of it.

J.C. arrived in new jeans, baby blue ropers, and a tight snap-button shirt. Emily thought he looked ridiculous.

“Hiya, Pickless,” he said, rubbing her head. “Jesus, what you got on your head?”

“Oh, I know …” her mother began.

“You want me to wash your head?” J.C. asked.

“No,” Emily replied.

“Why, I think that’s very nice of J.C.,” her mother said. “Why don’t you let him wash your hair? You don’t have anything else to do.”

J.C. washed her hair in the kitchen sink while her mother watched. He was very good at it. The water was the proper temperature, and he didn’t use too much soap.

“You got an interesting head,” J.C. said. “You should get it read sometime. I couldn’t do it, I’ll admit. I’m not about to tell you I could when I won’t, but there are those who can. You could even shave your head, and you’d still look okay.”

Emily kept her own counsel.

Her mother was looking at J.C. admiringly. “This is so nice of you, J.C.,” she said.

“I like washing hair,” he said. “It was a hard discovery to make, but I made it.” He dried her hair roughly and then began to brush it out.

“Don’t yank my scalp off,” Emily said.

“Not in the kitchen, maybe,” her mother said.

“You got any beer?” J.C. asked.

“Oh, I don’t!” her mother cried. “I meant to get beer. I’ll go get some.”

“I guess I should’ve brought my own,” J.C. said sourly.

After Emily’s mother drove off, he brushed out Emily’s hair as she sat in a lawn chair in the backyard. The brush made its way to the snaggled ends, meeting considerable resistance. A tangled bundle of Emily’s hair flew westward. “That just snapped right off,” J.C. noted. “You got the hair of an unhealthy person. If you decide not to opt for the shaved skull look, I predict you’ll be looking at a wig shortly down the line.”

“I don’t care,” Emily said. “You become what you are.”

An hour before sunset, already the mountains were adopting their hooded, secretive glaze. The sky beyond them had the hyacinthine hue of deep Heaven. Emily had never liked this time of day and made considerable effort to find some inane but absorbing pursuit to see her way through it. Something about a sunset demanded an assessment of one’s hours. What had she done today? She hadn’t even learned how to blow her nose. Her mother had a wish list concerning Emily, and the mechanics of nose blowing had been featured on it for some time. It would be on that disheartening list again tomorrow.

“It sure is going to be a pretty evening,” J.C. said.

She grunted.

“You don’t take to the end of the day kindly?” J.C. said. “I had a wife once, hated the end of the day. Picked an argument every sunset. The prettier the sunset, the worse she’d get. She’d be spitting spiders. She was okay otherwise, but a pretty sunset would just set her off. I think it was a fear of the passing of time. She resented it.”

“Sunsets do kind of bother me,” Emily admitted. “You can watch them, but they don’t need you. Even when you’re not watching them, you know they don’t need you.”

“If there’s one thing that don’t require you, it’s a sunset,” J.C. agreed.

“But you think they do,” Emily said, warming to the discussion. “You think you’ve got to watch them and say, ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful.’ ” She’d rather propitiate a Dumpster.

“I was married to that woman for six days,” J.C. said. “The worst six days of my life. We were taking our honeymoon in this old seaside house, and each night the sun would go down and bathe us in refulgent glory and she’d start her quarrel. We’d quarrel all night, and in the day we wouldn’t speak to one another. We’d read. The house had only one book, and we were both reading it. She’d gotten to it first and so she’d read a chapter, then she’d tear it out and give it to me and then I’d read it. It was about this Japanese doctor who invented the first anesthetic back in 1805 and his wife and his mother were always arguing and their daughter who was around your age dies of a cold and the wife goes blind after she insists that he try out his anesthetic on her instead of all the dogs he’d been experimenting on so she could share in his fame. Dogs were tottering around half dead through the whole goddamn book. They all had names like Mafutsu and Ostugi and Miru, because they were Japanese dogs. Couldn’t keep ’em straight.”

“Don’t tell me any more dog stories,” Emily said.

“I vowed never to marry again.”

“That’s good,” Emily said.

He pulled her head sideways with the brush and kept it there. “You don’t care for me much, do you? But you’d better get used to me because I’m going to be around. What do you think about that?”

Emily felt that a truthful reply would not be in her best interests.

“I do not know the dog stories to which you refer when you say ‘any more.’ I never told you any dog stories.”

This was more than Emily could bear. “You have,” she said.

He yanked her head down farther and she wondered if there was a possibility of it just snapping off. She didn’t know how it was attached to her neck in the first place.

“It’s not for you to make the judgment,” J.C. said, “as to whether you’ve heard a dog story from me.”

Emily tried to think a happy thought. She was driving with her mother toward the mountains. Tarantulas were crossing the road, waving their furry arms, and vultures were roosting in the cardon cactus. All was right with the world. She was drinking sweet syrup from those tiny waxy bottles, then chewing on the wax just this side of being sick.

J.C. hung his face down close to hers. She could smell toothpaste. Then he straightened, pushed her head up again, and resumed brushing. “We all got our dark side,” he said. “Sometimes we like to take it out for a walk, sometimes we don’t.”

Emily would have liked further elucidation on this point, though not from him.

“I could make you like me,” J.C. simpered. “It would be easy. Like, all I’d have to suggest to you is that we build a tarantula town together, and I’d have you eating out of the palm of my hand.”

Emily was shocked. Could he have had an awareness of her happy thought? Despite herself, she was intrigued. An entire town of tarantulas with different careers and objectives and modes of entertainment? “You would not,” she said, comforting herself with the suspicion that he lacked genuine knowledge concerning this tarantula town.

The brush descended and stalled, each time a little farther.

“I had a buddy once worked in a morgue, combing out people’s hair. He got a kick out of it, gave them all the bells and whistles, every one.”

“What’s a morgue?” Emily asked. “Is it like a jail?”

“It sure is!” He sounded so delighted that Emily knew she had erred deeply.

“He doesn’t do that anymore, though,” J.C. said. “He does something else now. He’s late, my buddy is. He doesn’t show up anymore. Do you know what it means to be late? If I say ‘My late buddy,’ you know what that means?”

Emily was silent. J.C. was having a hell of a time. “Whoops,” he said, “there goes the brush. All those snags of yours broke it.”

Emily put her hand against her head. It felt peculiar, like a piece of slick cloth. She thought it had lost some diameter. Her ears rang a little.

“You don’t necessarily look better, but you do look different,” J.C. said. “You want to bite me now? I’m giving you another crack at this. You’re still not scared of me, are you? You do this to anybody else, and you’d be medicated up to your eyeballs. You’d be wearing a collar that would give you a shock every time you had a freaky thought.” J.C. rolled up the sleeve of his shirt.

His arm looked just as unappetizing to Emily as it ever had. She guessed that wanting to be a biter wasn’t the same thing as being given the chance to bite.

“You can do anything you want in this world,” J.C. said.

“No, you can’t,” Emily said modestly.

“Why, sure you can. And if you don’t you’ll never know the consequences. You won’t be leading any kind of life at all. Of course, some consequences are better than others.”

“You can’t do anything you want,” she insisted.

“Yes, you can! You just need an authorization card. You know how to read yet?”

“No,” Emily said quickly, trying to look aggrieved. She was hoping he’d put his hand on some reading material and pretend he was trying to teach her. His mean-spiritedness in this fascinated her.

“Your mother must be starting to worry about you in that regard.” J.C. rolled the sleeve of his shirt down and took a wallet out of his pocket. The wallet was black and worn and folded over on itself, an ugly thing. He paged through some cards before extracting one. “Right here is my authorization to do anything I want.”

It was a card from a department store. Apparently if J.C. bought ten items of underwear at different times he’d get an additional item of underwear free. This included the purchase of pajamas. He was six down and had four to go. Someone had used a paper punch to tick off his purchases. “You only get ten permits?” Emily inquired.

“Then you get another card. But it’s harder to get authorization for the second card.” He looked at her expectantly, then put the card back in his wallet. “You’re kind of an inert child, aren’t you?” he said. “I’m glad I don’t have any kids.” He had felt somewhat tenderly toward her a moment ago but was getting more impatient by the instant. “I don’t like kids.”

“I thought it was dogs you didn’t like.”

“I got that out of my system,” J.C. said. “Now I don’t care about them one way or another. I’m in balance regarding dogs.”

Her mother returned with the beer, looking flushed and pretty. “Oh, I hurried,” she said.

J.C. took a ring off his belt loop that had a few keys on it and a tiny bottle opener. He opened one of the bottles and took a long swallow. Then he opened another and handed it to Emily’s mother. She smiled at him. “Nature’s most perfect food,” J.C. said, and took another swallow.

“Have you two had a nice time together?” her mother asked. “Oh, honey, your hair looks marvelous.”

“Best I could do with the material at hand,” J.C. said.

Emily wandered off into the yard. She crouched down for a thimbleful of sand, and was about to sprinkle it on her head but stopped short, remembering she was already under suspicion for this act.

The yard had big clumps of dead-as-doornail bushes lying all over the place, acting like bushes though they weren’t even rooted into the ground anymore. There was that marble she liked to leave there. The tiny perfume bottle to which she always professed delighted surprise. The lizard’s perfectly round hole.

Emily patrolled the perimeter. Beyond the chain-link fence, Ruth the Neighbor’s yard was perfectly green with grass. Ruth was applying something to it with a machine the shape of a child’s doll carriage. There was a drum in it, and the drum rotated and threw out just the proper amount of poison, corrective, simplifier, whatever it was. Ruth wore a paper mask over the lower part of her face. She was balding, and her remaining hair was an unconvincing black. Ruth was the one who took Emily to the Amnesty Days. The next Day was on the autumnal equinox, quite a way in the future, and Ruth thought it was quite the mistake, for most people were suspicious of equinoxes — believing them to be unorthodox, even pagan — and participation might be low. Emily didn’t know what pagan was. Possibly she might like to be one. But what she really wanted was to be a triggerman, or a poet. She did not want to work in sales.

She looked at her mother and J.C. together, a discomforting sight, and trying to coax up another happy thought, selected the train one. Trains passed through town four times a day, and Emily would ofttimes bicycle down to see them. There wasn’t a station, just a Dairy Queen and a small park practically paved with long red Dairy Queen spoons. Three of the trains would stop and people would get on and off, but the fourth train just tore on past, whistles wailing, and Emily particularly admired this one.

30

Dick and Dinah Webb sat behind their ten-foot cement-block privacy wall having tea. Two fainting goats, an ostrich, a kangaroo, and an assortment of pigs, ducks, and turkeys dabbled and milled around them. At the moment Dinah did not realize she was in Florida. She was in Africa, still puzzling over something a guide had explained to her years ago.

“When elephants can get beneath the bark and into the wood of the baobob tree, it’s just like chocolate cake to them. That’s what he said. Now, chocolate cake — what could that mean?”

The goats were playing on a little hill that Dick had built for them. Otherwise they showed no sign of being aware of the Webbs’ existence.

“He was an idiot,” Dick said. “Too smug by half.”

“What’s the other tree the elephants liked?”

“The speck-boom,” Dick said with satisfaction. As far as he was concerned, this was the best part of the day. Their conversations varied but were always ones they’d had before. Once great tourists, they now were pretty much confined to their property because of Dinah’s arthritis.

“The branches and stems had the puffy appearance of the arms of a doll,” Dinah said.

“Beyond weird,” Dick agreed.

“I’d like to have one of those trees. Do you think we could get a seedling or something?”

“A cutting?” Dick said.

“Could we, old sweetness?”

“I’m sure.”

“But where would we get the elephants?” Dinah laughed girlishly. Her gruesomely contorted hands rose a little, then fell back into her lap. Suddenly she wasn’t in Africa anymore — the terrifying sunrises, the thick beaks of the birds, the gazelles floating through the air. She had loved the sliver of green in the fierce bone white of the thorn tree. But now she was unwell and in Florida. But where was that? Florida could be anyplace, which had always been one of Florida’s problems.

A bell was ringing, which signified a visitor at the gate.

“I hope that’s not you-know-who,” Dinah said. Louise, a friend, frequently dropped by. She had Parkinson’s disease but had money too, and she’d paid thirty thousand dollars to have a fetal-tissue implant. A slender tube had been inserted into Louise’s skull and fetal cells dripped onto her brain. She was a big fan of the operation, and it was all she ever wanted to talk about.

“Or it may be Won-Yee,” Dick said. “Is this Won-Yee’s day?”

Twice a week, a Chinese acupuncturist put needles in Dinah’s ankles. This is where the garbage gets taken out, he always said. These are the garbage trucks collecting the garbage. Though she liked the needles, the metaphor was getting on her nerves and giving her shingles. She would give anything for it not to be Won-Yee.

Most likely it was just another passerby complaining about the wall. “Eyesore, eyesore, eyesore” or “If someone comes home one night a little muddled and runs into this he will surely kill himself and you could be sued. It don’t matter if you got the permit from the county. You could be sued and sued good” or “When you going to stucco the damn thing?” Usually they just stuffed anonymous messages into the mailbox, but sometimes they rang the bell before disappearing. Many were the objects the outside world tried to lob over the wall as well, but because of its height, most fell backward — to Dick’s satisfaction — onto the public way. Still, one of the ducks had been struck on the head with a bottle, and once the kangaroo had almost choked to death when it tried to swallow a small spray can of Slo-Cum.

Dick Webb loved his wall, which had been up almost a year. The footers went down four feet, and maybe for its birthday he would put a lot of jagged colored glass on top. Before the wall, their grassy yard had run neatly trimmed to the curb, and there had been concrete animals instead of live ones. He had constructed them himself, having always worked in the medium, as it was, being a concrete finisher by trade. He loved casting the statuary, stippling, swirling, and molding the lifesize animals to Dinah’s specifications. But people would bust them up or cart them off while they were sleeping, so he’d built the wall. The idea had come to him in totality one morning while he sat with his glass of grapefruit juice and his cafard, his life a shade, Dinah weeping at the kitchen sink where she was soaking her poor hands in salt, hands that she believed would surely be the death of her. He saw the wall, the whole concept, and set out to build it at once. The real animals had been Dinah’s idea, he couldn’t take credit for that. God knows where she got them. People were always excessing animals.

The bell kept jangling shrilly at the gate. Dick hiked up his trousers and headed toward it.

“Don’t let it be Won-Yee, dear,” Dinah said.

A deputy sheriff was standing there gazing up at the wall. He took off his hat. “Is this the family home of Ray Webb?”

“No,” Dick said. What had their boy done now! He must have some syndrome besides his ill health. He was always doing something.

“You are not Mr. Webb pater?” the deputy said and frowned. He was just trying it out, that word. In his experience, any word that put more distance between himself and the individual he was dealing with was backup assistance.

“I am not,” Dick Webb said.

The deputy put his hat back on again. “Do you have any idea where the Webbs live? I have some unfortunate news for the Webb family.”

Dick lowered his voice for added sincerity. “I don’t,” he said. He wouldn’t dream of troubling Dinah with this. For one thing, it would take so long to explain who Ray was — he had never been an easy concept to grasp — and when she did make the connection — her son, her only child, her troubled boy! — she would get upset. He could see her eyes tearing up, her poor hands paddling the air. Unfortunate news. That could very well mean you-know-what, Dick thought. Before long the deputy would return with verification that he was indeed Webb pater. He and Dinah would have to leave before that happened, get someone in to take care of the animals, go someplace that couldn’t be simulated in the backyard — Antarctica, maybe. They’d take a cruise …

“We’re renting,” Dick said as an afterthought. “Just moved in yesterday.”

The deputy looked doubtful. “Why would you want to live behind this thing?”

“Was it Bobby, dear?” Dinah asked when Dick returned. The kangaroo was sitting, as was its wont, with its head in her lap.

“Bobby?” Who was Bobby? Dick felt a little tired. “No, it was Won-Yee.”

“Oh my, I just don’t feel like having the garbage taken out today.”

“It’s all right, I sent him away.”

“Oh, thank you, dear. You’re my precious terror, my old precious terror, that’s what you are.” She gazed at him fondly.

Got to move on now, Dick thought. Get those tickets. Death is not failure, son! If indeed Death was what the deputy had been implying. Death is but a night between two days. Death is the Radiant Coat. Or perhaps Ray himself had offered the Radiant Coat to someone. You never knew about that boy. Had he once thrown an ax at his mother? No, of course not. It must have slipped from his hands at the kindling stump. Had he cursed him, his own father? No, never.

“Dear?” Dinah said, concerned.

“How about some aurora borealis?” Dick offered. “We’ll take a cruise and see the ice shelves calving their icebergs. Dawn at night. Penguins.” He might have gone too far with the penguins. They might be in just the opposite place.

“Why, dear,” Dinah said, “that would be lovely.”