The Quick & the Dead

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ADMISSION.

You are Here.

Enjoy.

They seem expectant still, though they have already walked within the Riddle, not this day but long before. They walked within the instant that is Death’s Riddle, and many moments later were reconstituted here, placed in the hollow liturgical court of this black garden. They roam no wilderness. There is no wilderness. It preceded them into the hands of man.

This is Eden turned hex backwards, where they have been resurrected into an air-conditioned hum. Belief in resurrection was the butt of pagan jest. The difficulties, the logistics of it … better to see dust as both more and less than dust and be finished with it. But here, in this place, the work was done hygienically and to scale, though the problem of the soul remains and is all the greater because their life had been their soul and was extinguished with them. Here the heavens are false, as is the very rock. The water is glittering real but slakes no thirst. From an egg (a debated touch) — a large hinged egg not centrally located — come the sounds of the morning when desired and the sounds of the evening when appropriate: the murmurs and cries, the preparation. Over everything, a dimness that does not quite touch them, but hovers instead like those angels who are unable to tell whether they move among the living or the dead.

31

Carter had started thinking of the girls as the Three Fates. He didn’t know why this image should have lingered in his mind, except that he was a classical sort of fellow. Contrary to the popular visualization, he had never seen those ladies as decrepit, tottering old crones but as irrational, merciless, impatient maidens. How did they all get along? They seemed so different. One spun, one measured, one cut. The only name of the three he could remember was Atropos, the Inflexible, which was definitely Alice. He thought of his dear Annabel as the spinner — good-hearted, a little unaware of what she was doing — and quiet Corvus as the measuring one. Alice was amusing; she’d be quite the zealot if she survived her adolescence. Corvus was tragic but allowed no gesture of condolence. She was utterly uncommunicative with him, though she did smile pleasantly if cornered. She lived in the protectorate of suffering.

He let all three of them have the run of the house, but they didn’t really seem to do anything, other than in his imagination, spin, allot, and snip. What were the names of the other two? He should look it up or ask Donald. Donald was such a student. While he was at it, he’d ask him the name of the Furies too, why not? They could look up the information together. He carved a light little image in his mind of Donald’s earnest blond head bending over a sourcebook … together … learning … their breaths lightly mingling.… Carter shook himself violently and surveyed his surroundings cautiously. No one there. The girls were in the kitchen, burning something; toast, it smelled like. The Furies, also, were three in number, though not so differentiated. The Dirae, the Terrible Ones, but they were well meaning in their way, weren’t they? They just wanted to set things right. They didn’t live on Earth, but they visited it a lot. Like Ginger. He was surprised she hadn’t shown up one night with a whip of scorpions. Then he’d know what he was dealing with! An old myth. Irrelevant. Ginger was … irrelevant.

No, she wasn’t, he thought. He yawned and looked moodily at his large bare feet. He had to get a good night’s sleep soon. Take a bath before retiring, Ginger advised. Don’t dry off, just climb dripping between the sheets. Your body, attempting to protect itself, will expend energy, making you sleepy. What she wanted, of course, was for him to contract pneumonia.

In late morning, it was one hundred fourteen degrees. What was he doing here? The heat made him long for a cool New England murky. His hair felt recently boiled. He had the groggys as well, most familiar-feeling groggys. Shouldn’t drop another touch, really, beginning today. In the kitchen he saw that the girls had cleaned him out of fresh fruits again, except for two pomegranates withering in a wire basket. What was the impulse behind buying these things? In thousands of households pomegranates crouched wizened on counters. Other fruits were all taken, even plums, but pomegranates were always left. There was something shady and unsatisfying and reproachful about them. They weren’t provocative like an orange, compassionate like an apple, weren’t straightforward like a pear. When he got his shoes on, he was going to toss them out in the desert for the little foxes. Then he saw a note: “Daddy, we made you a fruit shake. It’s in the fridge.” Carter was touched. It tasted delicious, too. He finished off the entire blenderful and regarded the pomegranates with more equanimity. Let them be what they were. What was the harm?

The girls were outside, lying under a couple of pool umbrellas. The Moirai — Daughters of Night provided with shears, the Destinies who spun the fatal thread. They didn’t seem to be conversing with one another. Young, their whole lives before them, or pretty much. Gracious, it looked hot out there! Sometimes he thought that if he could just get through this summer, everything would open up.

Carter emptied ice cubes into a bowl, added water, and immersed a fresh dish towel in it. He carried it into the living room and sat on the sofa, tipping back his head and laying the cold cloth across his eyes. Donald had suggested tapas sex.

He had.

“Tapas!” Carter had cried. He thought they were those small, warm, oily appetizers served in Spanish bars. At least that’s what they’d been in the days when he and Ginger were roaming around over there, watching those stupid bullfights, throwing the cushions in indignation, driving fast and gaily through the sharply edged Castilian landscape. He had wanted to go north to Montserrat, where Wagner’s genius had placed the Grail, but they had never made it, he couldn’t recall why. It hadn’t been Ginger’s fault, he was almost certain; they hadn’t quarreled so much in those days, hadn’t disagreed about every last thing, their innocent wishes had been more synchronized. Still, they had never made it to Montserrat, huge rock reared high in the clouds.

Back then, she had called him her stroke oar.

He pushed the cloth through the ice. “What!” he had cried. “Sex tapas?” Evidently — as Donald had quietly explained it — it was a union between two individuals wherein the sex organs are used, only not in a conventional manner. Sexual energy is controlled with intense concentration as it rises to a climax, the orgasm is experienced in the head, and the sexual fluid is reabsorbed back into the system, giving the individual extra energy. Physical desire is conquered in the same instant that it is fulfilled. It sounded quite refined the way Donald described it.

Carter stirred slightly against the cushions. He liked the idea of sex conquering physical desire — inappropriate physical desire, it might be argued — at the same time that it satisfied it. It sounded like a resourceful, streamlined process, not exactly fun but thoughtful and mature.

When Carter had politely inquired if Donald had ever attempted this unconventional sex before, the boy had softly expressed himself in the negative. Not that it mattered, of course, Carter said, but he guessed what he was asking was, if it went badly — well he supposed there was no way it could go badly but if it turned out more conventionally than they might have wished — would Donald be disappointed, would he think less of himself, less of Carter, less of both of them together for it? Because that would be … that would be unfortunate, because Carter was fond of Donald, very fond.

Who was that guy, Carter wondered, sprawled upon the pillows, who spent eternity up to his neck in water, parched with a thirst that could never be assuaged because every time he bent his head to drink, the water fled away leaving the ground all around him parched and dry? He felt a little like that guy. Frustrated.

He was in a mythical state of mind this morning — sinister punishments, great opposing armies clanging around in his head, visions of boyish sport. He groped in the bowl for an ice cube and put it in his mouth. He was willing to give this tapas sex a try, he had told Donald, though maybe they should put it on hold just for the moment. He’d been sober when he said these things just as Donald was leaving for the day, which was only yesterday; it was only when he was alone, which was only last night, that the nice brown drinks kept topping themselves up, producing the debilitation of the moment. He lay there chewing ice, a cool cloth over his eyes, thinking dartingly of Donald — those dazzlingly clean T-shirts he wore, that little pursed gash on his clear face that drew the eye right down into it … Carter groaned. They should try it out, but where? Not in this house. He could see Ginger capering around as they tried to concentrate. He wondered what it entailed — far more than just hauling out the old hose, he would imagine — but he’d been so excited that he hadn’t pressed for details.

“I don’t want to be a careerist,” Alice said. “A career, no thanks.”

“I certainly don’t want one either,” Annabel said. She was almost out of avocado body butter again, she could scarcely fathom how this had happened. “There’s nothing special about not wanting a career.” Alice thought she was so idiosyncratic. “Having a career has never preoccupied me. I want to — God — live a little, at the very least.”

Corvus lay between them like some creature in hibernation, though not curled. Annabel would protest, and she would protest loudly, if Corvus were lying curled in the classic fetal position of the inarguably depressed. She was spending too much time at Green Palms, that unscrupulous place from which emanated foul tales that just got worse and worse. That poor Mrs. McKenney, who kept a ten-dollar bill under her pillow to tip the girl who would have to wash her up after she died, had been robbed. She checked on that ten-dollar bill a hundred times a day, and someone had managed to swipe it while she was sleeping. It had been an employee, of course, a member of the rotating staff. Everyone kept rotating and rotating, they were there, then they weren’t there, then they were back again and you thought there was some schedule to it just before they were gone for good. The only ones who seemed even semipermanent — practically there since inception, which hadn’t been all that long, though the residents must have felt it comprised their entire lives — were those two nurses, one of whom was a total fright. Corvus shouldn’t involve herself so much in that place. Why didn’t anyone ever tell Corvus anything? Like, you must do this or you mustn’t do that? Corvus was throwing herself against a wall over at Green Palms. And Annabel thought that no matter how brave you were, if you just kept throwing yourself against a wall, what was the use?

“Corvus,” she said, “would you like the last of this body butter?”

Corvus opened her eyes. “No, thanks,” she said.

Annabel smiled at her. “It’s important to keep your skin moisturized.”

Corvus closed her eyes again.

“I don’t want to be part of a control group,” Alice was saying. “You know, when doctors give people placebos and other people medicine that might help them, I don’t think that’s ethical. I don’t want a placebo, and I don’t want the other stuff either. I want to be free.”

A hot breeze raised the scalloped edges of the pool umbrellas. It sounded like wavelets lapping far away. Corvus was making it sound like this, against any will she could muster not to: it was the sound of water filling her ears, the memory of the water her mother’s friend had offered. An early call to chaos and calamity, to the other side. But she had survived that moment and was now surviving sorrow.

There was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not a climbing but a sinking to a depth leached of light at which you are unfit to endure. And yet you endure there.

“Corvus?”

She didn’t open her eyes, just breathed in, breathed out. She’d had her own brief career as a lobbyist in the arcade for the still-living dead. She had wished to restore them to some success. She had talked and talked to them, projecting herself without words. She had clasped their worn, warm hands. They had thought her a fool. She needed to tamp herself down now, tamp herself down, measure out her breaths until they were gone. No one had to know she was doing it.

“Although sometimes people can get better if the placebos are administered in an enthusiastic way,” Alice said. “I don’t know, it’s a complex issue. I don’t want to be indifferent to anything, I don’t want to think of anything as inevitable.”

“Things are inevitable,” Annabel said. “Lots of things just are.”

“I don’t want to be”—Alice wasn’t sure about this—“credulous? But maybe I do.”

“You’ve really got us in a state of suspense here.” Annabel looked irritably at her stomach — flat, though not so flat as she’d like. Beaded with perspiration and oil, it looked pretty good, she thought, though utterly wasted on present company. She hoped she could hold on to her good skin, not hold on to it literally of course, but an awareness of the importance of proper maintenance, which she had, must surely give her an advantage over girls who didn’t give it a second thought. A phone rang. It was never for her. No one even knew she existed up here, out in the desert in this stupid house.

“You can still see the moon,” Alice said. “I like it when you can still see the moon in a daytime sky.”

Corvus opened her eyes, moved her eyes without moving her head, breathed in, breathed out, tamping herself down into that leached and lightless depth. She saw the moon, almost empty, standing hollow. Her mother’s friend had always pointed such a moon out to her. It appears that way because it’s carrying the dead, she’d told Corvus in her quick, low, gay voice. The moon is killing itself from carrying so many dead; you can expect to hear something strange when the moon lies like that. How had her mother happened to have as a friend such a Lilith? How had they met? For that matter, how had her parents met? She had never been told. She would never be told now. The hair of our heads will be like clouds when we die, her mother’s friend had said, your hair and mine and that of everyone we love and hate. I don’t hate anybody, Corvus had said. Like clouds, this woman said, when we become as clouds.

Carter hung up the phone. He and Donald had planned a most satisfactory evening for themselves, although that ambitious union Donald had in mind was still on hold. They were going to hear a string quartet downtown — opera companies never came within miles of this burg — after which they would enjoy a late supper. He felt better. Everything seemed fresher now, even though he was still uncertain about how precisely to proceed. “Should I order cyanide,” he sang, “or order champagne?” He should throw another party soon. Get that piano player back.

32

Alice’s granny and poppa were looking at a puzzle in the funny papers, a block of wavy, unfocused multicolored lines. They would bring the page close to their faces, then push it slowly back.

“I see it,” her poppa said.

“I see it, too,” her granny said. “Why don’t you try it, Alice?”

Alice studied it, crossing her eyes even. She wanted to be the kind of person who could see things that weren’t initially or even necessarily there, wanted the surprise of seeing the other something that was in everything, its hidden nimbus, its romance. “I don’t see anything,” she said. She felt hot with disappointment, as though in this simple optic failure she had failed the challenge of life.

“You don’t see the kayak?” her poppa asked.

“Kayak!” Alice said. “All it is is a kayak?”

“When I was a girl, it was Jesus opening his eyes,” her granny admitted. “These big heavy-lidded eyes, and they’d just slide slowly open and bore right into you.”

“Didn’t have to explain, just proclaim,” her poppa said. “That’s the way it was in those days.”

“Why bother, if it’s only a kayak!”

“Don’t get so upset, honey. Go get Corvus. See if she can spot the kayak.”

“She’s sleeping,” Alice said.

“That young woman sleeps too much,” her granny said. “I wish there was something we could do for her.”

“A locked heart is difficult to unlock,” her poppa said. “We’re giving her shelter for the moment, that’s the important thing. Shelter is what she needs right now.”

He cleared the table of the Sunday papers, and put out the supper things. They were having tortilla soup and coffee cake tonight. They had their favorites frequently.

“Do you know they’re raising pigs now for their organs alone?” her poppa said. “No more bacon or those barbecued ears that Fury likes. They’ll be too valuable for that.”

“I think Fury buries them directly, to tell you the truth,” her granny said.

“Seeing animals as food is so primitive,” Alice said.

“That’s what they’re saying. This is more civilized. Pigs will be bred for hearts and valves adequate for transplanting into needy humankind.”

“That is so wicked,” Alice said.

“If you needed a kidney,” her poppa asked, “would you accept one from a guinea pig just to tide you over?”

“Certainly not,” she said.

“A guinea pig kidney wouldn’t do Alice any good,” her granny protested. “It would be far too small.” She was more down to earth than her poppa, who sometimes just liked to stir things up.

“Animal donors are the future,” he said. “I can see the first pig on the cover of Time. The pig prior to the selfless donation of his heart to the president.”

“Time, that rag,” her granny said. “Well, I think it’s unfortunate. What will happen to children’s books? What will become of the classics? Remember your favorite, Alice? It was Charlotte’s Web.”

“ ‘No one was with her when she died,’ ” Alice said, her mouth full of coffee cake.

“What’s that?” her granny inquired.

Alice swallowed. “No one was with Charlotte when she died. That’s how it ends.”

“It couldn’t have ended like that, I’m sure,” her granny said, troubled. “That must be the next-to-the-last chapter.”

“What interests me about this xenograft craze,” her poppa persisted, “is that it shows people have found it’s enough for them to live in this world. They just want to keep on living. That’s where knowledge and the march of science has brought us. Right back to square one.” He coughed and tapped his chest with his fist, a piece of cake having gone down the wrong way.

“What is ‘xeno’?” Alice asked. “Was that the name of the pig?”

“Xeno, from the Greek. It means ‘stranger.’ Know your roots and prefixes, and you’ll find the world more accessible, Alice.”

“There’s a lot I don’t want to know,” she argued. “There’s a superfluity of knowledge. Most of it is useless. I choose not to know.” She blushed. When she had said something similar to this to Sherwin, he’d said, “You want to turn from civilization into a starlit darkness, don’t you, darling?”

“Don’t you worry about that C in school,” her poppa said. “There’s always next year. And I don’t want you worrying about that kayak either.”

Alice, blushing, ate her soup. A.k.a. Xeno, fiercely ate.

“I prefer news to knowledge,” her granny said. “I suppose because I’m getting along.”

“Talking about the news—” her poppa began.

“You know what this lady said to me at Green Palms?” Alice said. “She said, ‘Talking about tossing puppies back and forth,’ as though I’d been talking about tossing puppies back and forth.”

Her granny and poppa looked at her. Fury was looking at the wand on the window blind tremble so slightly. He didn’t know why it did that.

“What did she say next?” her granny said.

“She didn’t say anything next.”

“The reason people in those places seldom show resentment or complain about their situation,” her poppa said, “is because of a lack of continuity in their thinking.”

“Talking about the news,” her granny said, “did you hear about the woman in Detroit? Wanted a baby, stole one. Nothing unusual about that. Thing was, it was her girlfriend’s baby and the girlfriend hadn’t had it yet. Two girlfriends sitting around one night drinking wine and worse, and this woman gets it in her head that she wants that girlfriend’s baby and she just carves it right out of her, just scoops it right out like you would a melon, with some implement she found in the kitchen.”

“The Motor City,” her poppa said.

“It’s not called that anymore,” her granny said. “Anyway, woman went back to her own place with the baby, but she got arrested shortly thereafter. It was discovered that the idea hadn’t popped into her head suddenly at all, it was premeditated. She had a complete layette she’d purchased days before. Baby in question found to be perfectly fine.”

“I have something to contribute,” Alice’s poppa said. “Did you hear about the old gentleman who shot his wife and their aviary of cockatoos, then entertained some recovering addict who was trying to get her life back together by going door to door selling some sort of cleaner?”

“What kind of addict?” her granny said.

“Smack, I believe.”

“What do you mean, entertained?” Alice asked.

“Provided her with a cup of tea. He was just about to do himself in when the addict knocked on the door to relate her tale of self-improvement. His name is … I can’t remember his name. Eighty-six years of age.”

“Poor soul,” her granny said.

“Wife was ailing. Old gentleman was ailing. He was afraid that they’d deteriorate completely and their feathered companions would end up at the dump.”

“That’s where they would’ve ended up, too, if proper arrangements hadn’t been made beforehand. Course, that’s where they’ll end up now anyway.” Her granny cut them all another sliver of cake. “I bet that addict hustled right back to the needle after that experience.”

“Shot all his loved ones with a rifle right here, in our community. Then did you hear about the two hunters who shot a man crawling down one of our mountains? They thought he was a game animal and just blew him away at dusk, thought he was something else entirely. A case of mistaken identity. They said that dusk confused them.”

“It makes you feel we’re all living in some darkened dream,” her granny said.

It was sad when people tried to control the future by killing everything they cared about, Alice thought. Still, the future was a dangerous place. That’s what made it the future. But how could you shoot a cockatoo with a rifle? That wasn’t really appropriate. Her poppa must have heard that one wrong.

After supper they turned on the television. The best thing about the set, in Alice’s opinion, was the panther lamp on top of it. The panther had a little chain around its neck that had engrossed Alice for long minutes as a child. She had fiddled and fiddled with that chain. She wondered what she’d been imagining.

“This is a rerun,” her granny announced.

“I haven’t seen it before,” her poppa said.

“You most certainly have.” Her granny tapped the screen. “All these women here, they’ve eaten their mothers’ ashes. That’s what they have in common.”

They were an earnest assemblage, heavy, for the most part, in big-collared dresses. Some had taken just a taste before the internment, others were gradually consuming the entire box. They cited their mistrust of authority, their desire to take responsibility for their own grief, their determination to wrest control from the middleman.

“It’s coming back to me now,” her poppa said. “They talk about that pilot in California, at the end of it, the one who was supposed to be scattering ashes over the Pacific at the behest of families and was instead stockpiling them in one of those franchised Cubby-Holes.”

“Saving on airplane fuel, I guess,” her granny said. “Found two thousand boxes of cremains in one of those storage lockers. Been getting away with it for years.”

“That one,” her poppa recalled, “two in from the left … camera doesn’t pay much attention to her, but she’s the one who found out she’d been working her way through the wrong ashes after an investigation uncovered gross carelessness at the crematorium.”

“It’s a rerun,” her granny said. “We’ve seen it all before.”

33

What are you reading now?” Ginger asked.

He put the book on the night table and carefully placed on the open pages a heavy strip of leather with his initials embossed upon it. It was a gift from Donald. Carter couldn’t imagine how he’d ever marked his place before. It reminded him of a cestus, that leather contrivance Roman boxers used to wear around their hands.

Ginger seemed a little twitchy, the way she used to behave when she had the Smirnoff flu. Surely she couldn’t have taken up that business again.

“Reading is so inconsequential, Carter.”

“I enjoy it, darling.”

“You’ll be shocked when you realize exactly how inconsequential.”

“I was reading about Darwin and just came across a charming anecdote. When he took his child to the zoo and they looked into the cage of a sleeping hippopotamus, the little boy said, ‘Daddy, that bird is dead.’ ” Carter chuckled.

“And you find that funny?”

Ginger found very few things amusing. People falling, slipping, or sprawling inadvertently used to make her laugh, but that was about it. Once Carter had pitched forward at breakfast in an attempt to avoid dribbling some honey from an English muffin onto his shirt front, an event that had put Ginger in a sparkling mood for the rest of the morning. Had she thought he was having a heart attack? In any case, she’d found it quite funny.

She moistened the tip of her finger with her tongue and smoothed her eyebrows. At least that’s what it looked like she was doing. “There’s a woman here who saw herself before she died,” she said. “Her exact double.”

“Really?” Carter said. This sounded rather gossipy, and Ginger had never been one for gossip. Carter did not know if this signified a promising development or not. Was she settling in there?

“Yup,” Ginger said. “Her exact double. Rooting through the sale panty bin in an outlet store.”

Carter picked up the bookmark, which was lobbed and weighted at both ends. Maybe he’d get Donald a belt for his birthday next month. A belt was a good idea. A belt for one thing, absolutely.

“Don’t we look all a-bubble,” Ginger snarled. “Thinking of Donald again?”

“Jealousy is a base emotion, Ginger, it’s not good for you.”

“Not good for me! You haven’t once thought about what was good for me, ever since I died. You’re not even grieving, for godssakes. You didn’t even lower the flag back in Connecticut. Not even for one measly month did you lower it.”

“Darling,” Carter said. “People feel sad, they grieve, because when someone they love dies, this person, this loved person, is no longer to be seen. But in our situation, our unusual situation, I do see you. You’re very much seen by me, which makes it impossible to give you the grieving that’s very much your due.” He offered one of his most sincere smiles.

“Don’t you feel badly about the flag?”

“You have to be in politics or something, don’t you? So I thought.”

“You infuriate me.”

“It never occurred to me that you would want the flag lowered, Ginger. What do you think about what I just said, darling?”

Ginger said nothing.

He should recite Lucretius to her, a tantalizing punishment. “Cease thy whinings, know no care.” You are dead, Ginger, dead! Give up! The intentions of the man’s words, exactly. “Nor can one wretched be who hath no being!” Not that she seemed wretched, exactly; she was merely, as in life, making him so. Where was On the Nature of Things, anyway? A little book whose dark blue cover was warped a bit from getting tangled up in a damp beach towel once. He was beginning to misplace everything.

“I’m going into the other room,” Carter said.

“The other room is crowded,” Ginger said. “I believe Annabel’s in there with those girlfriends of hers. Girls who haven’t enjoyed the advantages Annabel has, Carter. I don’t know why you allow her to associate with them.”

“You can come along if you’d like,” Carter said slyly. She had never shown up outside the bedroom. He’d always attributed her appearance to a certain relaxation of his defenses, those moments of unfixed reverie before sleep that, when she got her teeth in them, morphed into detumescence and dismay.

“You’re not going to walk out on me, Carter.”

“Come along, then,” Carter turned, too quickly perhaps, and suddenly had a dreadful headache. He wondered if he could make it to the door. But with the headache came a quickening sense of urgency about his untenable situation.

“Headache?” Ginger suggested. “Didn’t you used to have headaches as a little boy? That gradually increased in frequency and severity until they were pronounced incurable by a number of doctors? And then they went away. Isn’t that right?”

“Ginger, you simply have to stop talking for a moment, darling, please,” Carter said, crouched in awe before this headache, a Visigoth of a headache, a Cat tractor of a headache, a sucking tornadic funnel of one.

“I’m surprised you weren’t asthmatic as well. Like half those teacakes at St. George’s.”

He couldn’t hear her now over the roaring in his head. Then the pain receded, ebbed like a wave sliding back with a slight hiss from the beach it had darkened.

“Couldn’t find your bolt-hole for a minute, could you? Always good to know where your bolt-hole is when things get overwhelming, when there seems to be no escape,” Ginger said complacently.

What was a bolt-hole, for heaven’s sake? She was palling about with Australians, Louisiana fisherfolk, and women who went to discount stores for their underwear. If this had been an ordinary party, she would have made Carter take her home long ago. Did Cole Porter and William Blake have their own area or something? He supposed they might. There might be some multisectional partitioning of the Beyond. Why not?

“When you can’t find your little bolt-hole,” Ginger said, “you can find yourself being ripped apart by unhappy circumstances.”

These were, of course, unhappy circumstances, Carter thought. Strange and unhappy and peculiar circumstances.

He opened the door. There was a long carpeted hallway, then the living room, where the three girls lounged. Petals from white roses had fallen prettily over the piano.

“Would you mind helping me find something, girls? I’m looking for a book, a little book.”

“Are you sleepwalking, Daddy?” Annabel asked.

“Why no, no. I thought I’d just come out for a small nightcap and ask you girls this question.” To ask that they come into the bedroom was probably improper. He should wait until daytime. But Ginger never showed up in the daytime.

He went to the refrigerator and pushed a glass against the ice dispenser’s tongue. Radiant ice in long fingers crashed down. He thought of the icicles on the eaves of the buildings at St. George’s. Never had there been such splendid icicles. The boys had broken them off and fought with them on frigid winter mornings. There had been some pretty amazing injuries, but they’d laughed them off in the full throat of boyish exuberance. He had been thinking about St. George’s a lot lately. He wondered if he should move somewhere where there would be ice again. He missed ice, superior ice. He poured scotch into his glass, and everything became less interesting in many ways.

He returned to the girls. “I can’t reach something in my room. I was hoping you could help me.”

“You’re taller than any of us, though, Daddy,” Annabel noted. “Are you sure you’re not sleepwalking?”

Her comment seemed strange to him; maybe he didn’t need this drink. He swallowed it anyway.

“What were you-all talking about?” he said. “I could hear your voices.”

“We were talking about Mommy, Daddy, and how none of us has a mother. I was saying how Mommy used to clean up after my throw-up — I was always throwing up, remember? — and there was a little bronze bell by my bed and Mommy would always come when I rang it and she always let me put out the candles after dinner with one of those little candle snuffers. One was a silver cone and one was a little beehive and I was trying to remember other things because it was my turn. Alice didn’t want her turn.”

“Well, those are very pleasant things to remember, honey,” Carter said. Ginger had never allowed Annabel to put out the candles and in fact hadn’t spoken to the child for an entire week when somehow the beehive candle snuffer had found its way into the play yard and Annabel had flattened it with her tricycle. As far as the throw-ups, Carter did recall stuffing a number of towels into the washing machine one winter season, but mostly a psychiatrist had dealt with the situation.

“Would you girls come into my room for a moment?” he said. “Just a moment.”

But of course Ginger wasn’t there. What had she done to his mind! She’d taken part of it and was gnawing on it like a sandwich. He saw what the girls saw as they looked around the room, his rumpled bed, the scattered books, the empty glass beneath the lamp, the rings the glass had made. The room was decidedly giving the wrong impression.

Beyond the large window a coyote sauntered by with the neighbor’s Siamese cat in its jaws. Only Alice saw it.

“What’s out there!” Carter exclaimed.

But Alice wouldn’t say, for Annabel’s sake, although she couldn’t conceal her interested approval.

Oh, the stubborn girl, Carter thought.

The coyote paused to rearrange the cat in its jaws, and Alice discreetly pulled the blinds.

“I was thinking of clearing out of this room, cleaning it out,” Carter said. “What do you think?”

“Daddy, it’s after midnight,” Annabel noted. “And you just changed this room around last week.”

“I was thinking of doing a little more to it, like tearing it down completely. Just whacking it off from the rest of the house.”

“You could put in a wildlife pool,” Alice suggested.

“Yes!” Carter said. “Then maybe they’d stop using our pool. Do you think they’d honor the distinction?” Carter was all for making distinctions. If Ginger would just make a distinction or two, principally between the requirements of the dead and the needs of the living … but Ginger’s mind, or whatever it was, made no distinctions, although a certain sloppiness was occurring in her style, a worrisome blurring of boundaries. She had used the phrase “Your ass is grass” the other evening, for one thing. How could one’s ass be grass? One’s days, of course, that was another matter entirely. However bibulous Ginger had been before, when she was alive, she had always been viciously articulate. She had always been witty and destructively unique. But he half expected her to scream, “I’m gonna smack your butt!” any evening now, or “Get your butt over here!” like an overextended toddler-laden woman in some shopping mall. It would be sad, really, if Ginger were reduced to screaming “Oh, my God!” over everything.

“A wildlife pool would be a great idea,” Alice said. “Just knock this whole room down.”

“Daddy, you can’t be serious!” Annabel said.

The girls stood around him, a puzzled triad. The Three Fates plying their ghastly shears, although only one did that. Atropos … Atropos … What were the others named? Klotho! He was cheered to remember. Klotho. But on the last one he still drew a blank.

“So many books in here,” Corvus mused.

“Yes, I like to read,” Carter said. “Sometimes I read all night. Please, take any you’d like.”

But of course she wouldn’t. The girl wanted nothing, he could see it in her eyes. It must be fearful to want nothing; it wasn’t as fulfilling as it sounded. She must feel sickeningly hobbled all the time. Yet she didn’t look anxious, any more than she looked indifferent.

“What can’t you reach, Daddy?” Annabel said.

The liquor had been spreading nicely through Carter, but it had now — and he couldn’t pretend otherwise — stopped. He continued to watch Corvus as though she were about to do something startling or inspirational. He realized he was holding his breath, then began thinking of Ginger again. They say that with people who die suddenly, you should tell them right away they’re dead or there’ll be trouble and misunderstandings on both sides. But he had apprised Ginger of the fact immediately, he was sure of it. Oh, that dreadful night, they’d both been tanked, and after the accident there had been all this discussion about the restaurant having dumped grease on the highway in the past, getting rid of it in the middle of the night, and causing accidents, but none, before this, fatal. Grease, grease, grease — that’s all anyone was talking about with the ambulance still wailing in the distance. And that stupid sign pulsating over everything: THEY’RE TOO BIG TO BE SHRIMP. The evening was preposterous. Really, Carter couldn’t blame Ginger for not taking it seriously.

He was in a sort of trance, during which the girls had discreetly left. Carter felt shaken. It was as though he had invited them all in to watch him be sick. He feared he would no longer enjoy quite the same stature in the house, that of the carefree but intelligent and reliable adult, someone who could be expected to be reading sensibly and artfully in his room at night yet could nevertheless be counted on should an emergency arise, someone who knew how to spend money and still had a future. Of course there had been the deer-in-the-swimming-pool incident, but that had been an exceptional evening. His liver hurt.

He went into the bathroom and shaved carefully. By now it was after two o’clock. The hours between two and dawn were like a gift that only a few unwrapped, a puzzling, luminous gift. He pushed the pillows up against the headboard, lay down, and stared straight ahead. What did those girls do all night? He should know, he should be more responsible, offer more guidance, but he was just a drunk widower in love with a yard boy. He got up and pulled the blinds back. The dark shuddered, as though he’d interrupted it.

He got back into bed. He wished he could write or paint, that he possessed some small talent. To race through the night with a pen! But writing makes everything clearer and worse at once, that is, when it wasn’t making everything appear worse without clarifying it. That was the problem with writing.

All was quiet. There was no Ginger, not even a pneumatic one. Isn’t that the way Paul suggests the dead are resurrected? Pneumatically? The thought of Ginger being pumped up by the whispering breath of a caring supreme being discouraged him. What a carnival everything was, one big lurid carnival. He sighed and turned on the television. “I’m going to kill you,” one half-naked person was saying to another, “but I’ll refrain from eating you because of your rank.” They seemed to be Druids, meeting in some sacred grove. But did Druids talk like that? He was certain Ginger was doing something to his television. The magnetism of inharmony. He turned everything off and gazed fretfully into the dark.

34

The Wildlife Museum had been built around the same time as Green Palms by a man named Stumpp, who had shot more than a thousand big game animals and now wanted to share some of the more magnificent specimens with the general public in exchange for an enormous tax write-off. They were all Stumpp’s animals, brought down by his own plump hand in Africa and Alaska back when those places were truly their selves. Africa at this point in time particularly broke Stumpp’s heart, crawling with people as it was. All those scrawny humans crouching in the dust. He wouldn’t go to Africa anymore. Let them have what was left; he’d partaken of it when it had been glorious. Stumpp wasn’t one of those trophy hunters who went on and on anecdotally about the beasts he’d shot. He couldn’t recall each and every incident, not even most of them, but he felt warmly toward all his animals. None of them had given him any problems, not like some of the humans in the cities over there, who would just as soon cut your throat if you didn’t give them coins for whatever nonsense they were offering you — nails or screws or Chiclets or the like.

The Wildlife Museum was built to resemble Harlech Castle in Wales. Its original design had included a moat in which Stumpp had planned to place several sharks, but this idea had been scuttled by a candy-assed county commission. But Stumpp was glad he hadn’t sued on the sharks’ behalf. They would have been alive, for one thing, which would have compromised the integrity of his establishment, and they undoubtedly would’ve been harassed by the schoolchildren on whom the museum depended for much of its revenue. The kids would have been chucking everything down at those sharks: last year’s laptops, trumpets, baseballs. The sharks would’ve been sitting ducks for those kids. So there was no moat. Instead, in front of the castle, were the typical parking designations, the stenciled collection of circles and lines that in developed countries announced that the place was sacred to the halt and the lame, that while they might be wobbly on their pins and had to cart themselves around in rolling chairs like packages, they still had rights of access and could be interested in things, in this case the dead of other species looking beautiful. The rear of the museum butted up against thirty thousand acres of National Monument land and was all glass and splashily lit, so it was quite conceivable that animals wandering down their trails at night could look in and witness perfection, not that they’d know it, of course.

In fact, Stumpp was a little bored with his museum. The Hwyl! was gone. It was stuffing the project down everyone’s throat that had been fun. And he was tired of dealing with taxidermists, a vain and surly lot insulted when it was suggested that they were little more than upholsterers. Not one of them had any balls, in his opinion — real balls. They all thought they were artists, yet you couldn’t really tell one’s work from another’s. There was a limit to what was possible in making an animal look alive that wasn’t. He was down to one in-house taxidermist now, a mop-up man.

Stumpp was a West Virginia boy, who as far as he was concerned had been born at the age of fourteen, when he got interested in buying and selling gold coins. As he liked to say, and did say to guides and gofers from Mozambique to the Brooks Range, you could spend your life like a damn goat staring out a crooked door through the rain at the mud, or you could spend it some other way. Life was what you made of it or, rather, what you made of your perception of it. Stumpp had dumped gold early and been equally prescient in the timing of his other interests and acquisitions. Most recently, with minor effort, he was doing extremely well in the arenas of gene research and embryo cryopreservation. Shooting megafauna had always been just for relaxation.

But he hadn’t been able to relax lately, and it was beginning to trouble him, as was the smell of shit he was detecting everywhere — not strong, but faintly pervasive. Ignoring it took effort, exhaustive effort of an intense mental sort. Did he have to become a goddamn yogi to escape the smell of shit? Nobody else smelled it, and he’d stopped asking. Not that it was a conversation stopper. Stumpp found that in good bars, hotel bars, say, where a martini cost ten dollars and arrived in a glass with the surface diameter of a goldfish bowl, people would accept this observation convivially, women in particular. Stumpp had a lot of respect for women and judged them to be more perspicacious than men.

“I can’t believe a man like you is having this … ahh, problem,” his last redhead said. “You seem radioactive with belief in yourself, which I find very attractive.”

But it had been a while since his last redhead, since he’d been flattered by any beautiful woman. These days were different days. There was something technical about them, undistinctive. You couldn’t tell the scientists from the vandals. You could order viruses through the mail — pathogens, toxins, what have you. A clever schoolchild could wipe out all the bees in a meadow during recess. They were breeding rhinos with no horns to make them less desirable. Couldn’t even get your goddamn rhino anymore. One of the companies he’d invested in was churning out genetically identical sheep. He stood to make millions, but what sort of real pleasure could be wrested from making money off genetically identical sheep? Where were bravery and singularity and radioactive charisma? Ever since the completion of the museum, Stumpp had felt himself in decline. It was as though he were descending some kind of goddamned terraced path with the smell of shit on a rising wind at his back. For it was at his back, giving lie to the sentimental saw that a wind at one’s back was to one’s advantage. The way Stumpp felt it, the wind was serving the interests of those yet unborn. Sometimes he even imagined it speaking, in the manner of an obnoxious junior high school coach: “Let’s give everyone a chance here, let’s allow everyone a crack at it.” … He should probably pull his money out of all that human egg research. But his money was making so much money. A tough call, money or mental health. Investing in the future had its psychological drawbacks. His money had even spread into oocyte banking. Eggs were being harvested from aborted fetuses. It was getting a little out of hand, those crazy scientists horsing around and having more fun than they had at Alamogordo, supercooling this and flash-freezing that. The lights go out these days, some power grid fails, and it’s not just your digital clock that gets scrambled and your freezer food that needs to be tossed, you could lose whole families, potential waiting families, nonexistent, sure, in theory, but with every right to exist. Everything that didn’t exist had the right to, was the new thinking — made an end run around the ethicists with that one — and although such notions would make money, particularly if you got in on the ground floor, Stumpp was ego sophisticated enough to see trouble ahead. Stumpp’s own parents (gone now) had been unexceptional in the extreme, but at least they’d had the grace to get him in the proper way. “It was in a rowboat, Stumppie,” his mother said. “I knew it at the time. It was like BINGO … my body knew.” At least they’d had the happiness of the old thrust and heave, the unexpected yaw. But these days it was all assisted fertilization, micromanipulation, people in different rooms. The joys of sex were irrelevant in the present climate, or so it seemed to Stumpp. His own old bean hadn’t seen much action lately.

The egg business was driving him crazy. He was thinking too much about it. He’d pull out of eggs. See if that tempered the wind at his back.

Sometimes he’d come to the museum of an evening, entering through the gift shop with all its trinkets. Signs of the Wild, ossified turds (utterly without odor), did well here — the kids loved them, but they’d get the shock of their lives if they tried shoplifting them. The whole shop was wired, everything had to go through the scanner. Little bags of sand — Own a Piece of the Sahara, Own a Piece of the Sonoran Desert — little cheesy books on habitat, videos of animals dangerous to man, tapes of sounds, night sounds, prerain sounds, postrain sounds, everything was tacked. Absolutely nothing could be taken without paying for the damn thing.

Stumpp disliked the gift shop. He’d never bought a gift for anyone in his life; it was one of his remarkable features. But it was necessary to pass through his gift shop, which he would do, scowling, in order to get into the Wildebeest Lounge, where he would mix himself a martini before entering the Great Hall to see his old friends, the animals.

The bears and big cats were in one room. Cheetahs by the baker’s dozen. No biggie, that. Common as pins now that the secret of their breeding code had been cracked. Takes two males to impregnate. Interesting, but not supremely interesting. It was their nonretractable claws that were sort of spellbinding. In another room, horn phantasmagoria. He had bagged them all — spiraled, lyre-shaped, ringed, triangular, corkscrew — but wished he’d never mounted just the heads. Those medallion things, he detested them; he might as well be some woman collecting plates. He was going to close off the damn head room.

There were eight rooms in all. Stumpp sometimes worried about the layout. Had a couple of okapi, the whole little family, weird ruminants. Moose, reindeer, should they be together? You could drive yourself crazy. The giraffes seemed to do well in corners, reaching out for twigs. Stumpp kept habitat replications to a minimum. Fake browse had no place here; he wanted to keep it dignified and simple. An atmosphere of limpid concordance. He gazed up at a giraffe. He had loved shooting them. There was nothing like the way they galloped and crashed, but as trophies they left something to be desired. They looked so mild and coquettish — those eyelashes! — and this one had been redesigned, with fourteen inches of tongue extended. To those of a moronic bent it might seem a little lewd. He didn’t want people snickering at these animals and had directed his employees to throw the bastards out if they were caught at it. As well as wanting an attitude of limpid concordance emanating from the splendid corpses, Stumpp demanded a churchly respect, no matter how hypocritical, from the paying customer. He himself had never laughed at an animal’s predicament, which had been, primarily, facing death at his hands. He’d never gotten a kick out of the deep death moans, the blood-choked sighs. On one safari he was driven almost to homicide by the habit of one of his companions, a urologist from Denver, who put his hand palm open on the side of his head, indicating “night-night, go to sleep” every time he brought an animal down. The urologist never, in an entire month, made a clean, instantaneous kill. At the end he was just potting hyenas to watch them tear out and gag down their own intestines. Stumpp later heard the stupid fart had been killed piloting an ultralight back home in the Mile High City. Night-night, thought Stumpp.

He had lost himself for a moment in the cinnamon-colored spots of his giraffe; there was true depth in those spots, they had in fact the potential of real sinkholes. He moved on to the elephant room. Here he’d gone to dramatic extremes, trying to do his best by the old girl who was his centerpiece and whom, he would admit to no one, he somewhat regretted having taken out. Matriarchs held the memory of the family, years and years of it in that small but heavily convoluted brain. The bulls were just all flesh and bluster; it was the succession of mothers and daughters who led the herd. The oldest cows knew time’s history. They remembered Africa, the breadth of it, and were the sources of imparted knowledge. Once the guns erased them, the ones who remained could know only less, always less. There was that much less of Africa. The young ones knew — what? Boundaries, quibbling, quotas. Each one needed three hundred pounds of food a day and sixty gallons of water. Sixty gallons every day in a drought-plagued land! They had the capacity to solve problems. What did they think, how did they reason? “I’ll cut back to forty, and perhaps I won’t be culled”? “I mustn’t get moody, or I’ll be considered a rogue”? The youngsters now knew almost nothing in their shrunken Africa. Couldn’t walk thirty miles without running into some piss-poor farmland from which they’d be excised like bugs. Agriculture — worst damn thing to ever happen to the human race. Hoeing and hoarding. Man lost a dimension. Lost all sympathy and sense of magic. Virgil, supposedly a sinless magician, referred to as such. Never cared for Virgil. Too rural, a farmer at heart. Plus a copycat. If Homer hadn’t gone before, it would’ve never occurred to Virgil to be Virgil. Then farming brought all those little mouths to feed into the picture. Little mouths that weren’t there before, not so many anyway, not construed as such.

He gazed at the great gone creature before him. Ears like sails, great trunk high. He’d had her redone three times, couldn’t get her exactly right. Felt he owed that to her. He’d taken out an encyclopedia here. Still, there had been dozens of other hunters panting at his back, snapping at his heels, who would’ve done the same, the night-night urologist for instance. There had been a lot of unpleasantness in the bush, but if you were there to kill, some unpleasantness was necessary. It had taken years to put this all together, dozens of safaris. There were some trumpeting bulls and pretty youngsters, one positioned as though walking beneath its mother’s belly as was the young ones’ preference as long as they were able. It was an exceedingly remarkable setup. He didn’t like people coming in here, actually, and often closed it off. The space was navelike, topped with a clerestory, a doxological space. There was a sound as though of the most beautiful music in here, but there wasn’t any music; Stumpp had been told it was merely the proximity of the main air-conditioning system. Music an inadequate word in this case. Susurrus of celestial murmurings. How could such a sound be artificial? Many aspects to everything. World a mad orchestra.

Stumpp stood, half a century old, self-made. Had built himself from the ground up. Little Stumppie. Parents loving and good, tentative in all matters. Salt of the earth. Liked warmth and applesauce. Feared water in the cellar and tanks of oxygen on wheels. Dear ones, but never tutelaries. Not as many tutelaries in this world as should be. Nor tutors. The age distrusted instruction. Distrusted instinct. Instinct all atrophied. Adrift in the dark, no better off than a motherless calf. All souls lonely, but what did it matter? Couldn’t matter less that all souls were lonely. Was in a soul’s nature never to be satisfied until infusion was achieved with all. Price was obliteration, which was unacceptable. Though only on one level; on another level, perfectly okay. The stillness to which all returns, this is reality, objective reality being nothing. No wonder everything so nonsensical. In any case, all speculation and preparation was futile. But resistance was not. Push against those blocked doors, push, push, push. Had suffered share of pain. Broken back once, broken arm, leg, jaw. Scarred and stitched all over. Old war elephant who had never once been surprised by joy.

The air-conditioning continued to murmur away like God’s own brook, unaware that it was a mere appliance, albeit a half-a-million-dollar one. Stumpp couldn’t look at his elephants anymore. He didn’t know why he came in here so much. Was coming in more and more. It hadn’t been that long ago that there was meaning for him here, and now it meant less every time. Couldn’t be good. He dimmed the lights and locked up, then followed the yellow footprints down the hall to the Wildebeest Lounge. Yellow footprints went to the lounge, blue to the exit, white to the water closet, green to the gift shop, red to the petting menagerie. Ridiculous idea though it had been his own, Stumpp being directionally challenged. No inner logic to the color code, no basis in anything. Still, of no import. Hadn’t they gotten all the colors mixed up in some early translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead? Now, there was a blunder. Someone working away on day seven after death or whatever day it was, working at following the red light and red wasn’t the right light at all, took them straight to Hell.

Stumpp made another martini in the lounge, then went into the cafeteria and popped a bagel in the toaster oven. Onion, his least favorite. Only onion left. Old people had taken all the sugar packets again, kiddies had lightly unscrewed the tops of all the condiments. He ate his supper hurriedly, keeping all further thoughts at bay, rinsed his glass and plate, set all alarms, and walked out through the blueblack night to his blueblack limousine.

35

We went sailing today. It was a lovely day, you would’ve enjoyed it.

A good brisk sail with a following sea.”

“Darling?” Carter said.

“Yes?”

“That’s impossible.” He was going to stress this from now on in his dealings with Ginger.

She crossed one tanned leg over the other. “It was”—she paused—“a ketch. It was not a yawl. Won’t ever mix those two up again. I remember asking you and asking you in the past and you never made the distinction clear. She was all polished and bright, and she had a lovely name. Her name was Revelance.”

“Darling?” Carter said.

“Yes?”

“Don’t you mean Relevance?”

“No, I do not mean Relevance, I mean Revelance.”

“But she couldn’t be named Revelance, darling. That would be a mistake. Now, it may very well be a mistake and your recollection quite accurate. The person who painted the name on the stern just got himself too close to the work. The fellow’s laboring over one big letter at a time with the utmost care, and he loses, well, not perspective, but the sense of order, and an error is born. I’m trying to put myself in the poor man’s shoes, darling.”

“What are you talking about?” Ginger said with disgust. “You’re not making any sense. You have no grasp of the situation at all. My best friend here is Cherity, are you going to dispute her name as well? You can’t even picture this vessel, can you?”

“You said it was a ketch,” Carter said dispiritedly. Scarcely out of the gate, and he’d faltered in his reserve.

“Try to picture the vessel with me, Carter.”

“No,” Carter said.

“Try to picture us all on board.”

“No, no,” Carter said.

She smiled at him in a friendly fashion, which was not like Ginger at all. The cordiality emanating from her felt almost sticky. She held the smile steadily aloft.

“Getting out on the, ah … water, certainly seems to agree with you,” Carter said.

“You should come along next time. Always room for one more on the Revelance.”

Carter winced. He simply could not stand the name. “I don’t think I’d be welcome.”

“Oh, you would, Carter, you would!” She bent toward him. “Why stay here? This is no place for you. Do you know that the desert is the loneliest land ever to come from God’s hand?”

“No, I … why, that’s very prettily put.”

“He said that himself. Didn’t know why he even bothered making the damn thing.”

“Actually,” Carter said, “on further reflection I’d have to disagree. I don’t think it’s any lonelier than anyplace else.”

“You disagree?” Ginger said.

“That is only one of the sometimes many benefits of being alive, as opposed to being dead. When you’re dead, as you are, Ginger, you don’t have the option of expressing a conflicting point of view.”

“You are actually disagreeing with—”

“Plus, when dead, I suppose you’re more conscious of which side your bread is buttered on.”

“I fail to appreciate the point you’re making here, Carter.”

She had recovered the use of phrasing, at least. They’d always been known for their educated quarrels. If overheard, people would say, “Well, at least it’s an educated quarrel.”

With a start, he realized it was daytime. Ginger was here at the pinnacle of healthful day, when the arrows of death flew unseen. This new development perturbed him. She had reached some new level of accomplishment or confidence. Daylight was streaming into the room as though to some promised jubilee.

Donald had suggested that Carter simply tell Ginger to go away, which just showed how little the wonderful boy knew about women, particularly a woman like Ginger. But Donald insisted that his mother had good luck with this back in Nantucket when there were silverfish in the drawers. “Go away,” she’d said firmly to the silverfish, not yelling, and they had. Another suggestion of Donald’s, which he’d carried out surreptitiously, was to scatter salt in the corners of the bedroom, but that had not been effective either. He’d had an idea himself but had forgotten it. What had it been? An apathy had overtaken him in the last few days, a numbness, a peculiar weariness. A hair had sprouted from his ear, vigorously long and ugly. His headaches were adopting a schedule of sorts. His feet itched.

There was a knock on the door.

“I’m not leaving,” Ginger said.

“Daddy?” Annabel called.

“What do you mean, you’re not leaving?”

“I won’t leave, and there’s nothing you can do to make me, nothing at all. Your crucials are at hand,” she added, alarmingly.

“Daddy!” Annabel cried. “A terrible thing has happened.”

He flung open the door.

Annabel was holding a crumpled paper napkin in her hand. “She blew her nose in it!” she wailed.

Carter looked at it, dumbfounded. It did look used, not disgustingly so but definitely damp; a paper napkin, after all, fulfilling, perhaps, its destiny.

“I’m sorry,” Alice called from somewhere.

“We were in my room,” Annabel cried, “and I have this little thing for Mommy there that I’ve made.”

“A thing for Mommy,” Carter said. “What kind of thing for Mommy?”

“It wasn’t like a retablo because I didn’t have anything to be thankful for, but it was this little arrangement that helped me think about Mommy. It had this little napkin that was in her purse that night and a lipstick and then that little photo of us together — I cut you out of it, Daddy, because this is for Mommy — and that silver hairbrush that had been on her bureau, it even had some of her hair in it—”

“Not my hair,” Ginger mouthed, shaking her head.

“It was just something I could dwell on, and—”

“You shouldn’t be dwelling on this, honey,” Carter said.

“—they were these meaningful things I’d collected, and Alice knew that. She knew that! And we were in my room and she sneezed and then she grabbed the little napkin right off my arrangement.”

“Honey, why don’t you sit down while we talk.” Carter gestured to the edge of the bed opposite to where Ginger had settled herself.

“I don’t want to, Daddy. Daddy, what am I going to do?”

“I never carried paper napkins around in my purse,” Ginger said. “What kind of person does she think I was?”

“I don’t like it here, Daddy. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“Sit down, honey.”

She looked directly at the place where Ginger was, he could swear she did.

“I don’t want to sit down. What good would sitting down do?”

“Honey, what would you say if I told you Ginger visits me sometimes, that she comes right into this room. What would you say?”

“Poor Daddy,” Annabel said.

Well, that’s sensible, Carter thought.

“How do you make it happen, Daddy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you pretend?”

“God, no.” Carter pointed. “She’s right over there.”

Annabel looked disconsolately through the empty space.

“She’s developing your chin, Carter,” Ginger said, “which is too bad. You could slice a roast with a chin like that.”

“You have to be serious sometimes, Daddy.”

He had never seen Ginger more incarnate. She was pulsating with an almost animal energy. No longer content with just existence after death, she had to be active as well. That day of sailing — but of course there couldn’t have been a day of sailing. Even so, he could picture the good ship Revelance borne on the back of a great fish, though surely in Ginger’s case the fish part was coincidence.

“Ginger,” he said, “your daughter wants to think about you, to make contact, and you’re being most inconsiderate, Ginger, by failing to respond. You were never as demonstrative toward Annabel as you could have been, and now’s the time.”

“Daddy,” Annabel cried, wringing the napkin, “don’t! You’re scaring me.”

“She’s not very plucky, is she?” Ginger noted. “Not much spunk. Charge wasn’t long on spunk either, as I learned to my disappointment.”

“She has my chin,” Carter said loudly. “You said so yourself.”

“Daddy, Daddy,” Annabel said.

“Honey, what would you like to say? Maybe this should be our approach.”

“Mommy,” Annabel said, “if you’re there, I don’t think you should be.”

“That’s very good,” Carter said, brightening. “Very good, honey.”

“Your opinions are laughable,” Ginger said, then laughed. Annabel was gravitating toward her. “Noli me tangere,” Ginger warned.

“Oh, please,” Carter said. “Isn’t that overly dramatic?” Still, it probably wouldn’t be helpful to actually touch … he tugged Annabel back.

“Must you involve everyone you know in our relationship?” Ginger complained. “This is between a man and a woman, you and me, two great antipodes of the universe. Why drag family into it? I’m asking for very little, only you.” She made a dramlike space between two fingers, which triggered in Carter the desperate desire for a strong drink.

She was becoming so bold she was practically thrumming. She’d show up at his parties next. Surrounding himself with others would soon no longer help. She’d be leaping into his arms, and then no one need bother calling a physician, any coroner would do. And to think that chance had brought them together so many years before, sheer chance. Surely he hadn’t been destined for this as a child, small for his age but then suddenly growing, thriving, at St. George’s. The open window with its eight-over-eight lights. The huge sills dusted with crumbs for the sparrows. The coldness of his sheets. The clock tower overlooking his world of happy preparation. To persevere and grow! Their inquiries had been ontological in nature. Oh, happy happy years of preparation. But then the preparation stopped.

The phone rang. “Donald!” Carter said. “Listen, I can’t talk just now, let me call you back.” But after hanging up, he found himself alone. The air felt particularly worn out, depleted. He then recalled what his idea had been: he would abandon this room to Ginger! No more imaginative than throwing a bone to a beast, perhaps, but still. “Yes!” he shouted. He would leave this room, just shut the door and never enter it again. All his favored possessions were collected here, but it was also the place where Ginger and her horrors gathered and pooled. Donald’s adjustments hadn’t helped. So let Ginger have it, let her muss it up to her heart’s content, take scissors to his fox-and-hound tie, scrawl obscenities in his books, smash his favorite whiskey glass into the whirlpool bath, scribble lipstick on his favorite pillow.…

Then he had a quick, keen vision of leaving the entire house behind, leaving the country and traveling for a year, maybe more, with Annabel and Donald. He saw the three of them on the cool verandas of mountain haciendas, chatting with other guests in the intoxicatingly dark nights, everyone attractive and world-weary, everyone quietly fascinated with the three of them and their story, which they would never disclose. They would rent villas and walk in the rain. Lease fine apartments filled with light and flowers. There was more than one way to resist, while accommodating, the temptations of a difficult time.

36

Emily was putting some words together. She wanted to protest a summer school excursion she’d been forced to take part in. “Would you ride your bike down and get our burritos, Emily?” her mother said. “Just tell them to charge it to my account.”

J.C. was sprawled on a cheap plastic reclining chair that Emily’s mother had purchased especially for his comfort. He wore shorts this simmering day and spritzed himself occasionally with a water bottle her mother had also provided. On his feet he wore sandals from which his massive toes poked rudely.

“Watch this,” he whispered to Emily’s mother. “Hey, Pickless,” he said, taking the key ring from his pocket and removing the smallest of the keys. “Stop by the post office and get my mail. It’s Box Forty-two. It’s to the left, one row up from the bottom, three over.” He pressed the key into her palm.

Emily hadn’t opened a post office box for weeks, not since the mother of her colleague Cedric had allowed her to open theirs. Cedric had never forgiven Emily for this and said he’d hate her for the rest of his life — a nasty, snotty, crappy hate, an icy hot hate mean as a hatchet, a fat white hate that would eat slowly at her like the worms in her grandmother’s grave. But Emily was not alarmed, for she did not consider Cedric a worthy adversary.

“I knew that would tickle her,” J.C. said to her mother. “A little kid’s mind is a simple thing to figure.”

“It’s sad that as one grows older, one’s pleasures become more complex,” her mother said.

Emily gave her the startled, walleyed look of one unconscionably betrayed. She wondered if it was possible that in the future she and her mother would fail to recognize each other. She ran to her bicycle and rode quickly away, stopping at the post office first. The last time she’d been here, she saw a dachshund wearing a sun hat. Someone said to it, “You’re very well turned out today, I see. You must’ve heard the weather report.” But there was no one in the building this time except for a woman and two little girls, who were squabbling over whose turn it was to open their box. The boxes were bronze and ornate with a little square of glass. Emily piously looked at the children, who were whining and carrying on. The mother, or whoever she was, finally chose one and nudged the other back, and the one not selected sat down on the floor, put her head on her knees, and wept.

Emily found J.C.’s box, looked through the glass, and saw there was nothing in it.

The little girl who had inserted the tiny key and opened her box and drawn out some mail, lovely long envelopes and a magazine, looked at Emily smugly as she left, but Emily ignored her. The other girl was still crying bitterly. “There are more things to life than this,” Emily would’ve told them if she spoke to children younger than herself, which she never did.

She picked up the burritos and pedaled home, hoping her mother and J.C. were not developing a desperate passion. Emily wished her mother would just settle down, but the world was just too full of distractions for her. In the last year she had joined the volunteer ambulance corps and taken up firearms instruction. She’d taken courses in bartending and blackjack dealing, all, Emily suspected, in the hope of meeting a desperate passion. Such dilatoriness was wasteful and improvident, Emily felt. You needed to know only one person in life, and that was yourself. You had to find that person and make friends with it if you could and hope it wouldn’t turn on you before you had a chance to familiarize yourself with its habits and tear you limb from limb. She wished she could meet the person that was herself instead of all those distracting other people, but maybe that happened later and not when you were eight years old. Her mother said that she wanted to hurry things too much, that she had even hurried her own being born, appearing three weeks before she was supposed to. Emily never tired of hearing this story, which verified her belief that she’d been someone else from the get-go. She had been born on a glass-bottom boat in the Gulf of California. “I just wanted to get one last little holiday in before my obligations,” her mother recounted. Emily loved hearing the story of her appearance and didn’t take offense at some of its meaner particulars, such as the demand by certain patrons for a refund, mostly an elderly contingent who undoubtedly saw in Emily’s unexpected entry the writing on the wall. The vessel, which was named The Bliss, was scrapped shortly afterward, as underwater visibility had been declining for years. The crew was enthusiastic, perhaps even deluded, and kept the glass clean enough; but they were increasingly garrulous about an ecosystem in which the gulf no longer played a part. The paying customer saw not at all what had been promised or inferred, only a vague, grainy drift, an emptiness that with effort might suggest some previous thriving and striving, but all in all a disappointment.

Turning into the alley, Emily saw that something new had been added to the garbage-container vista, a neatly wrapped package that leaned against the great receptacle. It seemed a different caste from ordinary refuse. In many respects it was prerefuse. Emily stopped to look at this extremely inviting parcel. She put the kickstand of her bike down, went over, and picked it up. It was unaddressed and exceptionally light. The wrapping paper was beautifully creased and folded with geometric precision, tied and secured with string. She put it in the basket with the burritos.

J.C. was still taking his ease in the reclining chair.

“Where’s my mom?” Emily asked.

“She’s changing her dress for supper. You raised in a barn? You should dress nice for supper, even in your own home. Am I the only one who knows simple etiquette around here?”

Emily had the bag of burritos in one hand and the mystery parcel in the other.

“What the hell’s that?” J.C. demanded. “You didn’t get that out of my box.”

“You didn’t have anything in your box,” Emily said. “I found this.”

“You just go around picking up suspicious-looking parcels? If I’ve ever seen anything in my life that looked more suspicious, I don’t know what it would be. You better stand back while I open it.”

“Emily,” her mother called, “come in and put this zipper back on its track for me.”

“I think your mother’s putting on a few pounds,” J.C. said. “She doesn’t want to put on too many more.” He took the ring from his belt loop again and pulled out the blade of a knife with this thumbnail. Emily turned from him and walked toward the demands of a stuck zipper with small enthusiasm. She opened the screen door, and as it fell behind her on its coiled spring, almost clipping her heels as it always did, a concise explosion of demiurgical ambition occurred. Emily looked behind her, puzzled. Her mother ran past, her mouth freshly lipsticked, the wide-open back of her dress exposing the prominent vertebrae of her spine. Emily had always found her mother’s spine terribly attractive.

The bomb had gone off compactly. J.C. was gripping his lap upon which, it appeared, a whole fistful of bright poppies had fallen. “Oh my God, it blew off Little Wonder,” he said. “Holy frigging God.”

A peculiar calm descended upon Emily. She stood just out of J.C.’s snatching reach — had he been interested in reaching for her, which was the furthest thing from his mind — and looked at him. It already seemed monotonous, though it had scarcely begun. Would this event lend itself to poetry? She didn’t think so. She wasn’t even actually sure what had happened.

J.C. peered between his outspread fingers and howled.

“Call the ambulance, Emily!” her mother screamed. “Call the emergency, call 911!” Then she said, “No, I’ll do it.” She looked at J.C. in an exasperated way and ran into the house.

Emily got a little dirt and sprinkled it on her head, rubbing it in good.

The ambulance arrived and the one who wasn’t the driver greeted Emily’s mother warmly. “What a coincidence,” he said. “Didn’t think we’d meet again like this.” He pried J.C.’s fingers off his shredded shorts.

“My stuff, my stuff,” J.C. mumbled.

“Be calm,” the medic said. “We’ve encountered this before, I can assure you of that. If we can find the damn thing, the docs will be able to sew it back on.”

“It’s around here somewhere,” J.C. whispered.

“That’s what I’m saying,” the medic said. “I’m sure it is. We’ll just get you stabilized, then we’ll start looking.”

“Couldn’t have flown far,” J.C. said, his eyes rolling whitely.

The driver started canvassing the yard in a desultory manner, having no patience at all with victims of illegal fireworks. None. Damn thing shouldn’t be so hard to find in this yard, which was very cruddily maintained.

“This your husband, Karen?” the medic asked Emily’s mother.

“No, no. Just a friend.” She smiled at the medic, then thought to reassure J.C. “We’re going to start looking for it right now, J.C.”

“Should I get a jar, Mom?” Emily said.

Her mother didn’t answer. She and the medic were heading off to the ambulance with J.C. strapped to a gurney. The driver was standing meditatively at one of the corners where the fence met itself, then thought better of it. “You got a rest room I could use?” he asked Emily. She nodded and pointed toward the house. Alone, she struck out across the dilapidated terrain. She didn’t know what the thing looked like, exactly. She guessed it had rings and was petaled sort of and squashed on top. She’d pieced this conception together from a number of sources. She would recognize it by its being there.

She saw the marble. There was the perfume bottle. Then she saw it, curled and winking on the dust by the lizard’s hole. A pretty lizard lived in there, with a big purple fan at its throat. That had to be it, Emily surmised, though it couldn’t be the whole thing. It didn’t look like it was the whole of anything. Some ants were already investigating it in the way they investigated everything, by crawling all over it. She stuck out her foot and nudged it a little. It looked pretty unexemplary. She nudged it around, then tipped it into the hole and tapped it in. It seemed a little spongy and didn’t want to go all the way in, so she ground it in.

Later that night, Emily sat at the foot of her mother’s bed, eating from a can of pumpkin pie filling that Ruth the Neighbor, beside herself with excitement, had brought over.

“He was a good man. He was attracted to me. Sometimes we had fun together. Oh, I know it wasn’t your fault, honey, I know. Knowing that is the only thing that’s keeping me sane right now. The only thing that’s keeping everything in perspective.”

“It is?” Emily said.

“A bomb,” her mother said. “I can’t believe, a bomb.” She was rubbing cold cream into her cheeks. Emily supposed that because of the seriousness of the exceptional event just past she wasn’t using her Facial Flex, a bizarre device that she customarily placed in her mouth for five minutes just before retiring, to combat muscle sag. Emily could tell that her mother wanted more than anything to use it, but out of respect to J.C. and his first night in the hospital she wasn’t.

“Do you want me to go away for a while?”

“What a thoughtful suggestion. Maybe. Not far.”

“Mom!”

“Then don’t say things you don’t mean, Emily! I can’t even think with you tormenting me like this. I thought you meant going to bed, to sleep. If you can sleep tonight, more power to you.”

Both of them were silent, mother and daughter, neither of them thinking much about J.C. but instead of how stimulating and surprising life was. To Emily it felt a little like Christmas Eve.

“A bomb,” her mother marveled. “The world has entered our lives.” She screwed the lid back hard onto the cold cream. “I know you never thought he hung the moon, honey, but I have needs.”

Though Emily wished that she herself had needs, all she could manage was colleagues, which, being as she didn’t even want them, didn’t come close to resembling needs.

“I’m just afraid that after this, people are going to think we’re kind of unwholesome,” her mother said. “This must not be made the centerpiece of our lives. I don’t want you to think of yourself as being bad or peculiar.”

“You mean strange?”

“We mustn’t be discouraged, Emily. Did you get a chance to talk to that nice medic today? He’s terribly nice. I met him in that class I took. He came in and gave a little slide show on the dangers of not knowing what to do in an emergency. Maybe when things settle down a bit, we’ll all go to the movies together.”

“I don’t like the cinema, Mom, you know I don’t.”

“Well, then, he and I will just have to go by ourselves, won’t we?” her mother said.

Emily finished the pie filling. Her mother continued to speak about the medic, who preferred to be referenced by his last name rather than his first. She said she liked this trait in a man.

Emily assumed that John Crimmins was in the past and was glad of it. Would she be required to send him a get-well card? Her mother looked tired and unhappy and confused but then she reached for the Facial Flex, which was in what she called her jewel box on the bedside table. There were no jewels within, but Emily knew that the device with its tiny rubber bands was special, slowing time’s progress on a personal level, her mother having told her as much in a more carefree moment. Her mother slipped the thing into her mouth, arranged her jaws, and sighed.

37

The portion of the dresser that Annabel had made into a little memory square looked bereft now that the paper napkin had left it. That napkin had lent the scene some sincerity. Alice couldn’t imagine where that violent sneeze had come from.

She was all right now. For a while she had saved, quite inappropriately, those stupid cigarette butts of Sherwin’s. But when they started looking like everyone else’s stupid cigarette butts, she threw them away. She couldn’t have distinguished them from someone else’s if her life depended upon it. Love was funny, the way it came and went. She gnawed her knuckles and looked at the orphaned items on Annabel’s blueberry-colored bureau, which now, because of her, seemed unable to transcend their nature. The sad thing was that Annabel had really tried with this, the tackiest notion in the room. Everything else was so tasteful, so perfect, the result of serious, practically pathological consumer coding. This assemblage had perhaps been Annabel’s first tentative clumsy baby step toward appreciating something larger — in this case, reductively, death, but with some work maybe something grander, like real life — and Alice had inadvertently, spontaneously messed it up.

Annabel returned and went directly to the bureau. Without a glance at its unevocative surface she pulled open a drawer and took out a beige cashmere sweater. She removed the one she was wearing, the gray one. Rather, it was shale. She didn’t have gray. She didn’t have beige either. God, beige. What were they thinking of back then? Ecru. It was ecru. Changing sweaters always soothed Annabel.

“Daddy thinks Mommy visits him in his room,” she said. “He thinks she’s in there now.”

Alice was relieved she was still speaking to her. “Why doesn’t your mother come in here?” she said. “Did you ask her to?”

“She won’t see me. I mean, I guess she sees me, but she won’t let me see her. I don’t think Mommy ever liked me. She was in love with Daddy.”

“You weren’t one of those awful children who were always asking, ‘Who do you love more? Me or Daddy? Me or Mommy?’ were you?”

“Maybe,” Annabel said. “Maybe I was.” Though she had never truly dared. It would have been too horrible to know, and alarming either way.

“Well, you’re paying for it now.”

“You are incapable of empathy with another human being, aren’t you, Alice? You must lack a gene. You’re just kind of abnormal. You’re like a fifth child or something.”

Alice was not offended.

“Your desert is so creepy,” Annabel went on. “I don’t even like the clouds out here. I think they’re creepy too.… This would never happen back home.”

“The desert has a tradition of very fine clouds,” Alice said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why is she here and not here? It’s not right. Have you noticed how much weight Daddy’s lost? It’s like he’s being drained.”

“Why can’t your mother just stay around if she wants? What’s so awful about that?”

“This is not Latin America,” Annabel said coolly.

“What does Latin America have to do with it?”

“In Latin America these things happen, but not here. Didn’t you ever have to read any of their novels in school? It’s because their culture is oppressed or suppressed or something.”

This sweater was coral. And this one was dusk. She had never thought dusk especially flattering, at least with her coloring.

“This is an interesting thing that’s happening to you,” Alice suggested.

“It’s not happening to me at all. It’s happening to my mother.”

“How does she look?” Alice asked.

“You are so morbid.”

“What does your father say? What does she do? Does she say anything? Can you remember what your mother’s voice sounds like?”

“Her voice?”

“The last thing you forget is a person’s voice. The next-to-last thing is the sound of their footsteps. Their tread.”

“Tread? Nobody treads.”

“The next-to-the-next last thing is …”

“You are not an expert on this, Alice. No one ever died for you. I don’t mean died for you, of course, that would be preposterous. I mean died in your personal experience. You didn’t even know your mother. You’re not even entitled to discuss these matters with me, if you want to know the truth. The thing is, if my mother insists on staying here I’ll never have my own destiny. What happens to me will still be part of my mother’s destiny. That’s not natural.” Annabel stopped fluffing and stacking her sweaters and paused dramatically in thought, Alice assumed that’s what it was, then began determinedly to pick apart the memory square. “Do you want this lipstick?” she asked.

Alice shook her head.

“I don’t even think it’s Mommy’s hair in this brush. I’m remembering she used it to clean the backseat of the car. She hated the backseat and was always worrying about it, like who Daddy had given a ride to. He was always giving rides to all sorts of people, particularly in the rain. She used to spray the backseat with poison, practically. And photographs where somebody’s cut out, that looks so dumb, you know? I never realized before how stupid that looks.” Annabel dumped everything into a wicker wastebasket and placed a piece of stationery over it.

The room had its equilibrium back, its sterile calm.

“I have to find another way to grieve,” Annabel said.

“I think you’ve passed through the grieving process,” Alice said. “I think you’re in the clear.”

“Both of them are crazy, they always were.”

“Who?” Alice said cautiously. “Mommy and Daddy?”

“Mommy and Daddy, right. I have to take a nap now. Come back later, okay, much later? You can come back later.”

Alice walked a mile down to the intersection where the bus stop was. Annabel was one of those people who would say “We’ll get in touch soonest” when they never wanted to see you again. Alice expected to hear those words any day now. She didn’t know why she spent so much time at Annabel’s house. The house meant something to her, she couldn’t get enough of it. It was already like some stupid memory of a happier time, a time that she could look back on as belonging to someone who was not quite Alice yet. She had felt a beat off all summer — just an hour off her real life, a year or two, maybe a few hundred miles. She wished she could be outside, in the world, but not of it. Still, being outside was very much like being at the bus-stop intersection where the desert and its flitting birds had been transformed into four identical Jiffy Lubes, one on each corner, none seeming more popular or desirable in terms of patrons than another.

The bus bench was empty, but someone had left a portion of newspaper behind. VOLCANO BURIES 450 IN GUATEMALA, a smallish headline announced discreetly. Alongside the article was a large advertisement for a toenail fungus cure. Didn’t people at the newspaper ever think of propriety and balance? Alice irritably stuffed the newspaper into a bulging trash receptacle.

She waited. After a moment or two she realized, realized fully, that she was waiting for the bus. This seemed to her the ugliest folly. She could always use Corvus’s truck to visit Annabel, or indeed to go anywhere, but she wanted it available for Corvus. She fervently wished that her friend would want to use the truck, but she was in one of her sleep marathons, rising only to go to Green Palms. She slept lightly with her eyes open, causing Alice to suspect she wasn’t sleeping at all but traveling somewhere terrible, following narrow, colored paths to multicolored lakes, all to the sound of jungles burning, waves crashing, mountains collapsing, horrible phenomena leaping out, frightful figures, masses of light — all Bardo bluff and all awful, with the added disadvantage that Corvus was alive while she was experiencing this, not only alive but just sixteen and a half years old. To experience Bardo normally, a person was supposed to be dead. Being dead would give a person some protection from this scary stuff, even though the whole point of the Bardo state, as Alice had struggled to understand it, was that it was just as illusory as life’s little activities and memories were. Maybe Corvus was just trying to speed things up so that when she did die at a respectable age — thirty, say — she would’ve done all her Bardo time and could just slip into that thing that had no beginning and no end, which Alice couldn’t grasp at all and didn’t sound all that fabulous, either. She just wished she could keep Corvus from sleeping so much. When she got home she’d make her eat a Popsicle or something. A Popsicle at the very least.

A bus drew up to the curb, the door opened, and the driver called down, “You going to the Wildlife Museum?”

Alice shrank back. “I certainly am not!”

“It’s Appreciate the Variety of World Wildlife Day. They’re running special buses. The museum’s the only place this baby goes. If you want to go someplace else, you’ll have to wait another five minutes.”

“I’d like to blow that place up!”

The driver grinned, then took a small camera from his pocket and snapped her picture. “I’ve received over one thousand dollars by providing the police with tips just on what I overhear on my route.” He shut the door, waved, and passed through the light just as it changed from yellow to red.

To make matters worse, Alice had recognized the camera to be a disposable one.

By the time she got home, it was the news hour. Her granny and poppa had their snacks and seltzer arranged on their collapsible TV dinner tables, which had their own little rack to contain them slimly when not in use.

A large airliner had gone down in the Atlantic weeks ago, and they still hadn’t found all the bodies. The entire glee club of a small southern college had perished, among others. It just went on and on, the search for bodies. The president was addressing the anxious relatives, and someone was screaming at him, “We want our bodies!”

“They’re doing the best they can,” Alice’s poppa told the TV.

“I went to France with my glee club when I was your age, Alice,” her granny said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“It could’ve been you on that plane,” her poppa said to her granny. “That airplane’s destination was France.”

Fury looked anxiously at the screen, his muzzle white, his eyes large. He was beginning to develop a distaste for the news. His stomach burbled, his paws hurt, he wanted to scratch and couldn’t.

Alice went into the kitchen, removed two Popsicles from the freezer, and peeled back the papers on one, then the other. Both were a thin and watery yellow, a slim bullet shape. She gave one a quick lap and couldn’t determine the flavor. Maybe the treats had been in the freezer too long along with the bagged remains of the birds Zipper had assassinated. Poppa was going to bury them when he was up to it, but he was becoming more and more preoccupied with the news, at all hours of the day. His handyman abilities were slowly atrophying. Overwhelming input and feeble output, he’d say, that’s my problem now.

He called out, “They executed another of them at the state penitentiary. Strangled an old lady with her Christmas-tree lights. Shot a young mother square in the heart and left her triplets toddling around in her blood.”

“Last words?” Alice called. Their last words were sometimes of interest.

“I think they drug them ahead of time to get some of those last words,” her granny said. “Dope up that last piece of pie.”

“There’s that fellow again,” her poppa said. “He’s getting a lot of coverage.”

We want our bodies!

Fury whined. It just came out. He was not one to whine as a rule.

“Don’t eat alone in your room, Alice, come out here and eat with us,” her granny said.

Corvus really had to return to the normal life of the household, Alice thought. Her granny and poppa had forgotten she was in the house with them.

Corvus is dreaming she’s on the island where they’d lived one year. This island could be Heaven, with its wooden walls smelling of lemons, the rugusa roses and blueberry bushes pressing against the windows. There’s a stone well outside with a pump handle and a raccoon who knows how to work the handle with his hands. There’s a claw-footed tub in the yard filled with pansies. There are old blue bottles on the sills that fill themselves with light. The ponds are full of quahogs and the sea with fish and the sky with crying white birds. The house is on a hill, and old wooden steps morticed into the earth lead down to the beach, where begins a trail of silvered boards that wind through the witchgrass to a strip of hard sand. Then there is the cold, shadow-dappled sea.

Her parents are not there, but that’s all right. Though she is still a child, there’s no alarming explanation for their absence. If they were there, they might not permit Corvus to go off with the mail lady, and Corvus must, because this is the dream she is dreaming. This is the day she goes off with the mail lady on her rounds, a woman who looks every inch the man, with her khaki uniform, her black glasses, her black watch strap, her jeep. To accompany her is an honor, that’s the thinking; she goes everywhere, knows everyone. Her big freckled hand slaps back the raised red flags of the mailboxes and reaches inside. She never looks at what she retrieves, just throws it in her sack, a slumped leather mouth beside her. She’s neither happy nor unhappy, the mail lady. They are through picking up all the mail in just a few hours.

“Would you like to see my house?” the mail lady asks. “I have two red squirrels playing cards.” Corvus pauses at such length that the woman is then forced to say, “I could give you something cold to drink. I could even make you a sandwich, I suppose, though normally I don’t eat lunch.”

“I’ll look at the squirrels,” Corvus says.

They arrive at the house. Seagulls stand one-legged on the roof, each with a drop of red on its bill by which each is known to its young.

There is one small room. A closed door leads elsewhere. Corvus looks at the squirrels, the cards wired clumsily to their long claws. She looks at a sanderling under a bell jar, at something suspended in a bottle. She declines the cold drink.

“I like animals,” the mail lady says. “I like having them around me. I like to collect Victorian fantasy, but I don’t snap up the truly freaky stuff like some collectors do, two-headed sheep and whatnot.”

The mail lady doesn’t have many people to talk to, Corvus decides. “Don’t you have any real pets?” she asks.

“I don’t have the personality for pets,” the mail lady says. “I know a lot about myself, and I accept it.”

Corvus doesn’t believe she knows a thing about herself for she is in a dream and in costume and could go berserk at any instant, as people in dreams and costumes do. Or she could merely blur and fade away. Corvus scratches at a mosquito bite on her shoulder.

“What would you like to do?” the mail lady asks. She has taken off her shoes and belt; her brown shirt hangs over her brown trousers.

“I’d like to see the rest of your house.” Corvus thinks the rooms are full of mail, hundreds of undelivered messages.

“There’s just one other room,” the mail lady says. “My mother’s in there on her sickbed. She’s very ill. This isn’t an intermission, unfortunately. It’s her final condition.”

“How long has she been in there?”

“Three years.”

The door is shut, there is no sound. There is some sort of object back there, Corvus thinks, an object with no meaning left. “Why do you keep her back there?”

“She’s my mother. Never think your body’s your friend. It’s your enemy.”

Corvus wets her finger and mops the bleeding bite with it.

“I’ll see her if you want,” Corvus says. “Do you want me to see her?”

“I didn’t invite you here to see her. I invited you to see the squirrels, who I thought you’d enjoy.” She appears to find the squirrels terribly congenial, prepared to provide hours of fun. “Look at this one! It can take our picture. I can put my camera between its paws and set the timer, and if we stand right here behind this line we’ll be at just the right distance, there won’t be parts of us missing.”

Corvus can’t see the line, which must be faint.

The mail lady is speaking faster and faster, as though she knows her time will soon be up. “There seem to be more girls around than ever,” she says. “In my day, an abundance of boys being born meant a war coming. But an outbreak of girls, who knows what that means, something even worse perhaps.…”

There are a whirring sound and a blossom of light, but Corvus never sees the picture. It is Alice coming into the room, the sudden light the door’s opening brings, and Corvus wakes up.

38

The summer nights were long. Stumpp left the museum shortly after eight one evening and to his astonishment saw a small child walking across the parking lot holding a sign. She had a narrow little face and wild hair and wore overalls, and she paced with the sign held rigidly in front of her.

POEM

Frightened

Unsafe

Grieving

In pursuit

Tracked down

Crying

Visiting

Hiding

They feel sad and unwanted

Emily Bliss Pickless Grade 4

Stumpp smiled. “Are you Emily Bliss Pickles, Grade Four?”

“It’s pronounced Pickless, not Pickles,” the child snarled.

“What are you doing out here all by yourself? Where are your”—he hesitated—“guardians?”

She chuckled bitterly.

“Grade Four?” Stumpp went on. “Isn’t that nice. And how old does that make you? Eight or nine?”

“A mature eight.”

He came a little closer to her.

“Nine-one-one!” the creature screamed. She had the lung power of a diva.

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes, I’m not going to harm you.”

“You harmed them,” she said, dipping the sign toward the building.

“You need a telephone to communicate with 911. You need an emergency, as well.”

“This is an emergency, this place,” the child said.

“The operator will wear you out with questions. She’ll want to know your location and the situation. You not only have to know precisely what’s occurring, you have to describe it as well. It’s far more difficult than you’d think. Help isn’t out there just for the asking, you know.”

This was the exact moment of sundown and as scheduled, the lights went on in Stumpp’s parking lot. “Let me drive you home,” he said. “Where do you live?”

The child bared her tiny teeth, drew from the bib pocket of her overalls a pair of scissors, and pointed them at him.

“They’re cutting-out scissors,” Stumpp said. “They’re for paper. They wouldn’t do anything except to paper.”

She stood no higher than a tabletop, and her hair was remarkably snaggy. Stumpp had never seen anything like it. He was surprised that geese or some damn thing didn’t attempt to nest in it. Her eyes were too big for her face and her hands too large for her arms. He wondered if the future would show fast-forward visualizations of embryos, indicate how they’d turn out, their pluses and minuses as human beings, what they’d look like in eight years and so forth. Why not? They’d know everything they dared to know about embryos very shortly. Emily Bliss Pickless probably wouldn’t have been given her chance at bat in more modern circumstances, not on the face of it anyway.

“You have a good hand,” he said. “That’s fine printing.”

“I’m picketing this evil place,” she said.

“Well, you should be out here during the day. The museum’s closed, so your being here couldn’t possibly have any effect.” Stumpp had an impulse to give her a lifetime pass, she was such a funny little thing. Barnum in his heyday would’ve plucked her off the street and made her into an attraction.

She shook the sign and scissors at him.

“Do you have other poems?”

“This is what I have to say right here.”

“But it’s really not relevant to my museum,” Stumpp said. “Whatever you’re talking about sounds still alive to me. Maybe you were thinking of a zoo. Initially, your poem seems impressive, but upon further study it doesn’t stand up. And this word ‘visiting’ is certainly not the word called for in this poem.”

The child seemed unswayed by Stumpp’s critical discourse. “I wish you were dead,” she said. “How would you like to be stuffed?”

“No one would pay to look at me stuffed,” Stump replied. “But my animals are beautiful. And you can get up very close to them, much closer than you could otherwise.”

In fact, many of Stumpp’s trophy animals had been shot at close range. They had seemed … disbelieving. That polar bear. Stumpp refused to muse overlong upon the polar bear. Whenever it shambled into his consciousness, it still had the power to mortify him. When you wanted to do a thing properly, that was just the moment when you wanted the process to be over with. You’ll do the next one right, something in your mind whispered. There’s always a next time, something in your mind said. What was desired, of course, was to hold on to the instant just before. But there was no holding on. Then you were just left with a carcass and a goddamn ringing in the ears.

“Why would I want to get up close to them? They’re fake.”

“They’re not fake,” Stumpp said indignantly. “What do you think fake is, anyway?”

“I like to get up close to things I know are there.”

Like all of her gender she was semihysterical and somewhat illiterate. Still, there was something deeply irregular about her, and that hair. Did she live in a wind tunnel?

“Do you know Cedric?” Emily asked.

He’d known Cedrics. Mumblers. Sycophants. Vain about their ankles. Large wives. “Do you?” he demanded.

“Cedric’s my colleague. He loves this place. He wants to be a sportsman and make conservation possible on a grand scale, just like you.”

He certainly had swallowed the line about the museum hook, line, and sinker. It was disappointing when self-justification was so successful.

“Your arms must be getting tired,” Stumpp said wearily.

“No, they’re not,” Emily said, “but I’m putting my scissors back into my pocket.” She did so. “You should be ashamed of yourself, appealing to people like Cedric. He’s not strong. He’s just weak and clingy.”

“How old is Cedric? Is he eight as well?”

“An immature eight.”

“But little boys catch up,” Stumpp said. “And then they leave little girls in the dust.”

She seemed unperturbed by this judgment as well. “Cedric’s always saying, ‘The next time we go, I hope he has more of them.’ ‘We’ as in our class, ‘he’ as in you, ‘them’ as in there.”

“That’s the kind of customer we like,” Stumpp said distastefully. This little twit Cedric was uncomfortably familiar. So much in life was similar, remindful of something else. Wanted more more. Because nothing’s there. No. Next to nothing, munificently robed. Even worse.

“I presume Cedric’s not a friend of yours,” Stumpp said.

“I don’t have friends,” Emily said.

“Ahhh,” he said.

“I have to be careful concerning people I don’t like. I didn’t like someone and I wasn’t even concentrating and something bad happened to him. I have to be extremely careful.”

“Well, that’s very responsible of you,” Stumpp said. “Still, I guess I’d better watch out. In case you forget to forget your dislikes, as it were.”

“You maybe better had,” Emily said. “So do I have your assurance that you’ll shut this place down?”

“Shut it down?” Stumpp looked at her tolerantly and shifted his shoulders inside his old oiled hunting jacket. The relationship with his animals was the only true connection he had ever known. He had been the instrument in a grave transaction. The primary instrument. Yet he hated the memories. Memory in man different, not so noble. First memory, first loss. All downhill thereafter. “I love my animals,” he said. This felt to him somewhat inadequate.

Emily scowled at him.

“You’d better leave now,” Stumpp said. “You’re trespassing, you know.” He pointed to a small pink bicycle flung down in the middle of the parking lot. It looked ridiculous and certainly seemed incongruous with the likes of Emily Bliss Pickless. “That must be yours.”

“It is my vehicle of choice, yes, for the present anyway.”

She really was an annoying little runt. Hers would not be a profitable or particularly satisfying life. “What’s your favorite wild animal?” he asked. “What’s the wildest animal you’ve ever seen?” He just wanted to needle her. She probably hadn’t been anywhere or seen anything.

Emily twirled the sign and after a moment said, “A crow.”

“A crow!” Stumpp laughed more loudly than he’d intended. He had shot so many crows, hundred and hundreds in his childhood alone. Ducks were no brighter than a knot of wood, but crows were sort of complex. Oh, those hecatombdays in the ragged swampy burnt-over woods of his youth! He seemed to possess a magic gun and could wander and kill at will in the dear old swamp next to his parents’ simple home. And he had discovered something for himself in that lonely skeletal swamp: that it was more fun to wound a crow than to kill it, because then you could hear it calling out to the rest of the flock in an evangelical screech. Young Stumpp had been fascinated by the production an injured crow could make of its situation. Even now the sound remembered sent a lurchy thrill through his belly, the calls from the downed one and the answers from the rest of them, the still whole ones, beating heavily back and forth in the brown sulfurous emissions from the paper companies. He could almost taste the tang of that swampy air right here in his own desert parking lot and hear the calls of the heavily beating flock, sorrowing and apologizing and making plans for some other time. Time. He realized that crows had always reminded him of time, dark time. He gazed at the backs of his hands, at the plummy dark repellent veins.

“You’re very misguided,” Stumpp said.

“If you’re kind to a crow, you’ll receive a gift,” the child said.

“I wouldn’t want a gift from a crow,” he said loudly. “God knows what you’d be getting. I’d say, ‘No thanks, you black bugger.’ ”

“That’s racist specieism,” Emily said with some difficulty.

Stumpp looked at her, alarmed. “You’ve lost your childhood, haven’t you? Smash-and-trash bastards have stolen it. Left-wing vegetarian freaks.” Once more he was attacked by the impulse to snatch her up, take her under his wing as it were.

In his remembered swamp he once saw a flock of crows attack and kill one of their own. He didn’t have his gun that day — it had been taken away as punishment for some failure on his part that he’d forgotten but that was undoubtedly hygienic or academic — and, idly wandering, he had come across the drama in some broken oaks. The attacked crow had submitted to them, hadn’t tried to flee, and after not too long a time — young Stumpp being witness from start to finish — the torn, bloody, practically decapitated crow had fallen, and the muttering flock had vanished into the haze like black stones cast into water. What a judgment that had been! A judgment to fit a great crime, made by great mad wheeling clerics, a force, an incomprehensible damning intelligence. A formal sentencing made in the ruined air over a rotting landscape. His happy acts of extermination seemed but a happy game compared to this.

He looked at his old wattled hands and stuffed them into his pockets.

The child had walked over to the bicycle and was struggling to right it. “On further consideration, you shouldn’t be permitted to just pedal off,” Stumpp said. “It’s getting dark, it’s late.”

“I’ve gone everywhere on this bicycle,” Emily said, “though it’s true I don’t like it much. I’m not sentimental about it or anything. It’s functional.” She looked at it impassively. “Seven thousand miles,” she said.

“Certainly not!” Stumpp exclaimed. “Impossible!”

“I’ve been around,” Emily said.

“But I’ve never seen you around. And I know this city well. And I’ve never seen you in the museum, either, with your colleagues.” Surely he would have remarked upon this phenomenon to himself, this phenomenon in passing.

“Do you have a mother?” Emily asked. She was on the bicycle, moving it forward a rotation or two, then backward, barely maintaining a balance. It made him nervous looking at her. She didn’t look as though she knew how to ride at all.

“Of course I did,” Stumpp said.

“Did she ever want you to pretend you were retarded so she could jump a line, say, at the bank or the grocery store?”

“What?”

“It’s fun. You get to whirl, you get to gibber, I was just wondering if we had anything in common.”

“She sounds unfit, your mother.”

“She just doesn’t like lines. Hates ’em.”

A truck tore by on the road above them, its immense length rimmed in lights, with a cargo of acids or blood or veal calves. A cargo of caskets or pirated videos and perfumes, of those dolls that were the technological sensation of the coming season, that would spit at a child if their circuitry determined that not enough attention was being paid to it. The driver was smoking, tuned in to the libertarian station, half asleep.

“You’ll be crushed out there,” Stumpp said. “I’m driving you home tonight. Hate me if you wish.” He grasped the handlebars and began towing her toward his limo. The sign almost clipped him on the head. That word “Visiting” really galled him. “Steady there,” he said.

The doors floated softly open. Emily placed the sign inside and threw her faithful bicycle in without ceremony. “Where’s the driver?”

“I like to drive it myself.”

“These things are supposed to have drivers. That’s why people have them. Does it have dual air bags?”

Poor tyke, Stumpp thought. Everything she was learning was beside the point, though everything anyone learned proved to be beside the point. How false and full of pretext is all that we accomplish. Little Pickless made him dwell on the undwellable.

“I’ve got air bags in here for twelve people.” Car would float away like a zeppelin if they started to go off.

“Do you know twelve people?”

“I do not,” Stumpp said.

“I didn’t think so. I’m going to sit in the back.”

“Lovely,” Stumpp said.

“Can a person make tea back here?”

“They can, actually.”

“This is very nice.”

Gratitude flooded Stumpp’s tired heart. Little precursor. Wee mahout. Form the mover of all things. Time mixed up, almost flew right past, the whole shebang. No need for time to be dark, could be bright, transcendent. Pickless, was it …

39

Alice,” Carter said, “how much would you charge to kill Ginger for me?”

This was a strenuous request, and Alice was flattered. She would waive all fees for Mr. Vineyard, who’d been awfully nice to her. But Alice was a realist; murder, in this case was out of the question. “You want me to kill your wife?”

“It would be wonderful.”

“I really think that’s beyond me, Mr. Vineyard.”

“You have the heart of an anarchist. I can’t imagine where else to turn.”

“But that would be awful, Mr. Vineyard. If you could kill a dead person, it would be like killing something really rare and special, like the first of its kind or something.”

“Ginger is no unicorn, Alice.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin, quite frankly, Mr. Vineyard.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Carter said. “It has certain connotations for me, I’m afraid.” He was so discouraged. He couldn’t discuss Ginger with Donald anymore. Donald wanted to go on to other things, and Carter couldn’t blame him. He was beginning to doze off when Carter went on about Ginger. He would just slip right off to sleep, the most innocent boy in the world. And there Carter would be, watching him, enchanted, still talking, talking interminably, uncontrollably, about the perverse, unholy demands of Ginger. Donald was becoming disenchanted with him in his sleepy, hospitable, uncomplicated way. Donald was beginning to think he was nuts.

“Think with me, Alice!” he cried. “Think with me! What can be done? You’re a thoughtful girl, a daring, irreverent girl. It would be a remarkable achievement.”

“I could be Girl of the Year,” Alice said gravely.

“At the very least!”

“It’s against the laws of nature, Mr. V.”

“People have done worse to nature, far worse. You of all people are aware of the perniciousness of humankind’s presence on Earth.”

Someone was listening to her! Or at least overhearing her as she wedged her warnings about ecological collapse into the most benign conversations. “The impending extinction spasm is going to produce a cataclysmic setback to life’s abundance and diversity,” she mumbled hopefully.

Carter looked at her blankly. There was a wafer of connection here. The dead are coming back. And it had to do with the diminishment of everything else. Like happiness. It was not just millennial thinking. It was Ginger. Perhaps there were other cases. The dead are coming back. Or not going away. Whatever.

“Your wife has got to be just in your mind,” Alice said.

“Not my wife anymore,” Carter protested. “Please, at the very least—”

“I mean, you don’t even go into your room now, do you? I see you sleeping in the living room.”

“Sometimes I go over to the Hilton,” Carter admitted.

“The Hilton! They poison coyotes at the Hilton! They have the ones made of bronze in the lobby and then they kill the real ones on their stupid golf course!”

“I’ll speak to them about it. Alice, dear, we’re veering off track here.” It was a lucent night, of a brilliance he was beginning to loathe. In fact, it was night again; the days just kept collapsing into one another. He had come back to pick up some shirts and see Annabel, but where was Annabel? He had estranged himself from Annabel with his … his instability. He had no idea where Donald was. He might be out on a date for all Carter knew. An immense encephalitic moon hung above them all, and it seemed an appropriate moment to plot the murder of someone dead, it just did. Weren’t those stars up there dead? And they kept twinkling away, didn’t even know it. There might be some foundation for Ginger’s claim after all.

“Does she ever show up anywhere other than your room?” Alice asked.

“Never at the Hilton. I think the Hilton confuses her. They’ve got five hundred rooms over there, you know. Two hundred suites.”

“Well, where is she now?”

“God knows,” Carter shuddered.

“She’s in your mind,” Alice persisted.

“No, no, only to the extent that we’re discussing her. You know how that works.”

Alice didn’t. Her own thoughts were like a masked, hoarsely babbling mob, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“So what does she want from you?”

“She wants me to die! She wants me to share death with her!” She had always wanted to share her problems with him, her weight, her menses, the fading away of her menses, her crushes on men … now this. She was relentless.

“Everybody knows you can’t share that,” Alice said. “Maybe you only think she wants that. She probably wants something else.”

“But what would that be? There isn’t anything else.”

“Some tiny thing, maybe,” Alice said. “Microscopic. Infinitesimal.” There was, of course, something horrible about the infinitesimal.

“No, no, she wants me to join her and go on as though nothing happened. She’s getting more — maybe you’re right in part. At first it was like motes, but—”

“Motes?”

“Yes, motes, they didn’t add up at first. The first few nights she appeared, it was all sort of ambiguous.” Maybe if he’d hired a band to play during the cremation; that’s what the Buddhists did, according to Donald. But the crematorium was in an industrial park! And the undertaker said it would take three hours. No exceptions. It had always taken three hours, it would forever take three hours, which sort of ruled out a normal band. The undertaker, an unhappy man as he had never realized his dream of being a Navy SEAL, having an unreliable stomach, was not sensitive but nonetheless seemed to be functioning intuitively with the three business, for didn’t three symbolize spiritual synthesis? Didn’t it solve the problem posed by that infernal dualism? Three was a remarkable figure for the situation, Carter remembered thinking even at the time. He had never considered going to the industrial park as an observer for those three hours. He had passed the wretched plot on the highway many, many times; Ginger, too, for that matter. One building made velvet, another corrugated cardboard, another paint. One place had been busted for churning out fake military medals. Another, he thought he’d heard once, rendered horses. Oversized American flags flying, chained dogs everywhere, the hulk of bulldozed trees. Still, maybe if he’d had a band — a band might have been just the thing to occupy Ginger’s mind during the difficult transition.

“But we’re not talking motes anymore,” Carter said. “This is far beyond motes. She’s strong now. Strong. Sometimes I think she’s about to yank me up out of here. She’s just waiting for me to lose my balance, and then …” He trailed off. He wanted to get back to the Hilton, have a few drinks in the bar, take a piss in one of their splendid urinals filled with crushed ice. There was a world out there, a world where he could still be active. Donald said he should strive to make his mind buoyant and flexible, capable of addressing any situation. Yes, yes, he had only to convince this girl here, Alice, that she had what it took, had the potential, to murder his dead wife.

“Does she live in your room now that you don’t?” Alice asked.

“Live there?” Alice didn’t grasp the problem at all. “Why, no. That would be all right if she did, if she couldn’t get out. That would be perfectly acceptable. But I’m afraid — let me tell you what I’m afraid of — that because I don’t go into that room anymore, it gives her license to go everyplace else. I think I made a tactical error by abandoning the room, see, she was pretty much contained there. She hasn’t come to the Hilton yet, but why wouldn’t she, once she figures it out? Those key cards are hardly the ultimate in human ingenuity.”

“Maybe it’s her soul you’re seeing,” Alice proffered. This somewhat fit in with her more recent theory that the soul was something you acquired only after you were dead, and by then it was determined to pursue what was most important to it, no matter how misguided the pursuit was. Mr. V. was the treasure meant for Mrs. V. alone, which was having unfortunate consequences for Mr. V. Marriage sort of disturbed Alice; it seemed all aftermath.

“Her soul?” Carter shook his head and felt something pop and grind subversively. No, no, this was Ginger, a simple yet practically incomprehensible parallelism to Ginger. Clearly one couldn’t murder a soul, or if one could it would be very bad, one of those inexcusable things. Still, he realized he was using Alice, or trying to, as cat’s-paw. He should be ashamed of himself. “I’m sure it’s not her soul. It looks just like her — I mean, just like she did.”

“Just like she did when?” Alice asked, for there couldn’t be just one moment that was you, could there? When you looked like yourself, the way you’d be remembered?

But Carter did not address this question. “She used to be rather languid, viperish certainly, but sort of indolent, the way vipers are when they’re not trying to sink their fangs into you. But now she wants to sink in her fangs and she’s coiled with intent. Coiled.”

Alice wanted to help Mr. V. out, he looked on the brink. “Let’s take a look in your room again and see if she’s there.”

“I haven’t been in there in a week,” Carter said.

Alice had an alarmed instant of feeling they had to water Mrs. V. or something, a blurred glimpse of the soul as an animal, ignored if not forgotten, thirsting, its woeful paws curled beneath its famishing.

“Well, let’s take a look,” Alice urged.

He strode purposefully toward his bedroom door. He disliked the door; it was not a fine door and was even hollow. For an expensive house, much had been scamped. He turned the knob and pushed the door back.

Alice peered into the dark. “It’s really quiet in there,” she said.

He heard Ginger’s laughter, which brought to mind the weekend they’d been Christmas shopping in New York, the evening they’d been drunk and run up the down escalator at Sak’s — far more difficult and enjoyable than you’d think. He wrenched the light on so vigorously that the plastic dimmer switch came off in his hand.

Everything looked in terrible disarray.

“You’ve been robbed,” Alice said. “Have you been robbed?”

Carter peered at the room. Initially, it didn’t seem as if anything was missing except his little clock — no, it had been safely relocated, he kept it by the bar now. But he could hear it ticking, or something was ticking, a tocking rondo in his head.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“But it looks as though the police have been here. What’s that yellow ‘Do not cross’ tape?” The tape beribboned the room with festive authority.

“That’s a joke,” Carter said. “I put it up. Just a joke.” There was The Nature of Things. It looked a little the worse for wear. Poor old Lucretius. A love philter had turned him mad. He reeled in the tape, winding it around his hand. “Do you feel a presence in here, Alice? Sort of a permeation?”

“No,” Alice said.

He was afraid Ginger had gotten herself into everything: the broken pool pump; the shot exhaust manifold on the Corvette; the tax audit; the thickening muscle around his heart detected by the yearly exam (he had seen a little something on the X ray, a clinging succubus he knew was Ginger); the weevils in his favorite brand of instant scone mix; Donald’s pulled groin muscle. Definitely Donald’s groin muscle …

“Sherwin says that God permeates the whole world,” Alice said, “and lives in everything as the purest spark.”

“God!”

“Sherwin’s saying that just popped into my head. I realize your wife — it’s not the same thing at all — I realize that.”

“Sherwin who? You can’t possibly mean the piano player.”

“Have you given any further consideration to the wildlife pool in this location?”

“Alice, I want to confide something to you. I don’t think she’s completely here anymore. I mean, we could bring in a wrecking ball but I don’t think we’d get all of her now, if you see what I’m saying.”

“There’s nothing here, Mr. V.”

“Exactly! Nothing can live anywhere! That’s exactly what Ginger is doing.”

“Do you two talk?”

“I shudder to say,” Carter said. “We do.”

“This is really sort of impressive, Mr. V. You two must’ve been exceptionally close.”

Carter had been twisting the “Do not cross” tape around in his hands. He raised it to his mouth and bit down on it, looking at Alice dully.

“Mr. V.!” Alice said.

He lowered his hands.

“I don’t feel any kind of presence at all in here.” Alice hoped for his sake that she wasn’t just having another no-kayak moment. Of course, she’d never even met this dame. She’d only heard Annabel’s somewhat inconclusive stories about her, which she suspected were somewhat gilded.

“The problem is that she’s not here now,” Carter said.

Alice nodded. “I don’t have anything to work with.”

“But I could call on you again if necessary.”

“Absolutely, Mr. V.” She looked around the room a final time. A big no kayak.

Back in the living room, Carter seemed a little steadier. “Spending the night, are you, Alice? Keeping Annabel company?”

“Annabel’s painting her nails, Mr. V. She has this new color called Needles in a Haystack. She’s really happy with it.”

“Why? It sounds gray.”

“It’s a complex gray. It has a whole world of sophisticated meaning for her. She wants to make herself over, but she’s not considering reconstructive surgery.”

“I would hope not,” Carter interjected. Sometimes communiqués absolutely essential to being an informed parent were just thrown at a fellow. “I wouldn’t acquiesce to anything like that.” He had responsibilities toward his daughter, but they just made his mind fog over.

“She wants to perfect parts of herself by choosing patinas and little adornments and effects that are apparently recognized by people she wants to be recognized by, or so she says.” Alice frowned.

“But that’s so … so common, Alice. Annabel can’t be obtaining her ethos through nail polish.”

“It’s so-called nail polish only to us. To Annabel it’s something more. She’s unhappy here. She needs a different set of acquaintances, I think. She’s kind of mad at me.”

“She’s annoyed with me, too. I fear she finds my behavior erratic.”

“That’s okay, Mr. V., we understand. You’ve just lost your wife.”

“If only I had,” Carter said fervently. “Alice, I need to confess something to you. I wanted Corvus to speak with Ginger, and I wanted that because I find Corvus not quite there or even here, if you know what I — let me say it another way. A healthy, happy person wouldn’t be able to talk sincerely with a dead person, particularly to someone as annoyed and annoying as Ginger. Now, God knows I’m not healthy or happy, but I’m not nearly as disillusioned or fatigued in spirit as Corvus, poor girl, fine girl, and I thought she could have a relationship with Ginger that would nullify her, blot Ginger right up, as it were, absorb Ginger’s nada into her own. What was the harm, I thought.…”

He saw himself for an instant as a monster of the Russian persuasion, on a galloping sledge throwing an infant to the slavering wolves almost upon him. Then he saw himself as some idiot in a feathered loincloth throwing a virgin down a well — what were they called? Cenotes, of course. No, his might be a different mask in a new setting, but he shared the same withered atoms with the long-gone louts of a certain ilk. He’d do anything to get the job done.

“I’m actually quite appalled at myself for considering employing this troubled girl in such a way, but I thought afterwards she will be less troubled, because after Ginger’s gone I will get the finest treatment for Corvus, the finest treatment for a fatigued and disillusioned spirit, available.”

“You haven’t looked into availability yet?” Alice said.

“I deserve your disgust and mistrust. I don’t feel any better for having confessed this to you.”

“I could have told you beforehand that you wouldn’t.”

“I can only say on my behalf that I did not approach her. She would have accepted, and I think it would have proved a terrifying experience for her.”

“She shouldn’t be occupied like that. It’s beneath her brilliance. In many ways she can’t be harmed. You couldn’t have harmed her, so you shouldn’t worry.” Still, Alice was disappointed in him.

Carter was surprised that Alice saw her friend as such a model of stability, or perhaps she was just trying in her somewhat inefficient way to defend someone who was precious to her.

“When you go back to the Hilton,” she added, “be sure to question them about their predator-control policy.”

“Uhmm.” He might forgo the Hilton and check into a Hyatt instead. He’d had the worst dream the night before. There were too many drapes on the windows, layers and layers of them; it was like coming to in a shroud. He couldn’t remember the details, but like all dreams it seemed to partake of both death and life, something added to the first and subtracted from the latter in a foul union, most unpleasant.

“The coyotes,” Alice reminded him. “Predators. Life needs predators to be in balance.”

Carter asked Alice to return to the bedroom and retrieve his book. She reappeared to announce she hadn’t seen it, which made Carter break into a pronounced sweat. Gone again? He was coming to the conclusion that nothing was easier than going insane.

In the Corvette, he misplaced the keys, finally locating them in his tightly clenched fist. He danced the car down the driveway, blowing a headlight just before he reached the road. Alice watched with concern. It sounded as though something metal was banging around under the hood. And that black smoke. Rings, she thought. She didn’t know what rings were, though she’d heard the word spoken with assurance by those observing smoke pouring from a vehicle’s pipes. It augured nothing good.

40

His first and last canine had been a Border collie. Technically it was a triumph, but his client was upset because it didn’t look as though “Jim” were herding anything. What’s he got to herd now? the taxidermist said. He’d always been direct back then, believing only charlatans showed charm. He’s got to be herding something or else he won’t be happy, the client said. Then you need a surround to show him, the taxidermist said, “I ain’t an interior decorator.” But he knew he’d have to forfeit the bill, maybe even return the unrefundable deposit. The client was an old man, and a tear had run down to drop from the tip of his old man’s nose. He felt in his bones that he’d arranged something terrible to be done to his Jim. I can’t even bury him outside my window like I once could have, the old man said.

It had been an unfortunate moment even then.

The taxidermist scowled at the infant gorilla he’d been working on all morning. He was dissatisfied with its expression, it lacked hunger. He nudged it into his trash can and moved over to his broad wooden desk. He’d never heard of this wood before. Some new wood. Like the fish they were coming up with these days. Monkfish. What the hell was monkfish? Turbot. The same. He’d go home, and the wife would say, “I’ve got this lovely piece of monkfish from the new market,” and he and the family would gather at the table beneath the cathedral ceiling in the house she’d insisted they purchase and eat it. The cathedral ceiling was ridiculous, the whole house was ridiculous, a Taj in the foothills for which they’d unwisely overextended themselves. Still, he was glad she was content. She’d been about to unravel back in Alaska. He’d enjoyed some prestige, having done all the bears in the Kodiak airport, but doing all the bears in the Kodiak airport didn’t provide the kind of income one would expect and she’d had to take a job as a housekeeper in a hot springs resort where the Japanese honeymooners just about drove her crazy. The Japanese had invented the concept of the Alaskan honeymoon and came there in droves to do it. They didn’t tip, they shed pubic hair like crazy, and they beamed, they were always beaming.

They’d gotten out of Alaska just before the short bitter days had come round again, the moose in the cesspit jokes, the grafitti on the snowbanks of the pissed-on frontier. The wife selected to bring nothing along but her old blue Samsonite filled with the tiny dresses of her babyhood. Just in case, she’d say, just in case, not that she was campaigning for another one, but if it happened and it was a girl, or if the boys had little girls when they started their own families — maybe the clothes could be used then. The thought that these rotting, stained, shrunken, incredibly delicate clothes worn by his wife when she was newly born would be imposed on the future, where naturally they would be entirely unwelcome, depressed him. Sometimes he didn’t think his wife was well, that those goddamned cavorting Japanese had broken her spirit, that she’d lost the little something she had when he first met her that made it all seem worthwhile. Of course, she had her baby clothes back then, but they hadn’t seemed so peculiar, so out of proportion to their lives; they hadn’t reminded him, yellowing things, dark where they’d been folded, of the Momias de Guanajuato in Mexico, the Museum of the Mummies, where he’d gone when he was still single, when it was still weird and distasteful, before they’d cleaned it up and made it into a clean, well-lighted museum where you were funneled past the things through a narrow corridor so you couldn’t linger to study them more closely, people pushing up behind you so you had to keep moving and before you knew it you were back outside where some pear-shaped amputee scooting around on a dolly was selling postcards of the momias, the baby momias dressed in their Sunday best, the embroidered smocks and bright blankets remarkably similar to the stuff his wife kept in that sinister blue Samsonite.

The taxidermist shook his head vigorously to free it of unwanted thoughts. He picked up the newspaper, leaned back in his chair, and propped his feet on the desk. He read that those goddamned Japanese had developed a prototype of a robotic cat. Those people needed to be given their own army again, get some realism back into their lives. A robotic cat, aimed at the elderly-widow market. This was what the future was: robots, artificial intelligences. There would be no sincerity, no art of the kind he’d devoted his life to. The future was a place where the dead looking alive would no longer be enough.

Abruptly, his door swung open and Emily Bliss Pickless entered carrying a cardboard box.

“Hey,” the taxidermist said. “You knock first. You knock.” He removed his feet from the desk.

“I need something,” she said.

“Yeah, a brain.” He loathed this kid.

Emily shrugged. People either wanted to worship her or snap her in half. So do the exceptional ones walk through this world. Though she was not vain.

The taxidermist peered into the box. A puddle of fur and blood and bone, impossibly breathing.

“You’re not normal,” he said. “Anybody ever tell you that?”

“I am distinguishing between life and death,” she said, “which is more than anyone else in this place does.”

“Don’t quit your day job for that talent, missy.” She was gazing around his workplace with maddening impunity. He’d smack her little fanny and push her out the door — this was his office, his workplace, his sanctum sanctorum — but he was uneasily aware that she enjoyed some special relationship with his employer. Maybe she was a niece, a grandniece. Unmarried oddballs like Stumpp always had nieces and nephews galore, and it was the taxidermist’s opinion that these terms were code for abnormal or immoral relationships. The taxidermist had always felt this to be so. Say the word niece to him, and the red flag would go up right away.

“Pest,” the taxidermist said.

“Why’d you throw this little gorilla away?”

“Get out of my trash, you!” He felt that he’d been hounded by this kid forever, though she’d showed up only a few weeks ago. Stumpp had given her one of the rooms at the museum for her animal “hospital.” He’d had a carpenter build her some cages, and there was a tabletop full of dog and cat cages customarily used for airline travel. He’d bought her a refrigerator and a few heating pads and some pans and dishes and towels. Even told the chef in his café to provide the little freak with anything she required — salads, ground meats, fruit medleys — though the taxidermist took pleasure in the fact that none of her “patients” had taken any nourishment before they croaked.

“You don’t know how to do this anymore, do you?” she said. “You’re just pretending.”

The taxidermist stalked out of his office in search of Stumpp. He found him in the oasis room, where he seemed to be listening to the air conditioner.

“Hey boss,” the taxidermist said, “that Pickless child? She’s adorable but she’s forever bothering me, wasting my time. You hired me as an artist, and she’s always intruding on me, taking my needles, rummaging through my tooth and eye drawers — those things are organized, I tell her.” He shivered, quite involuntarily, in the chilled air.

Stumpp looked at him irritably. Waves of an elusive melody had been bearing him outward, beyond the confines of this place wherein he had interred himself. This was one hell of an air conditioner. Airy-fairy flaky types, which the desert and these new millennial times seemed to produce in abundance, would likely lose their wits after a session with this baby. You had to be a strong man to fiddle around with the kind of consciousness this unit inspired. This was ethereal business, and he resented being interrupted by this oaf. If he mentioned even once again in passing that he’d done all the bears in the Kodiak airport, Stumpp would punch him in his pink wet mouth — with a mouth that repulsive, hadn’t he ever considered a beard?

“Pickless?” he finally said. “You came in here to complain about Pickless?”

“People are going to be bringing her roadkill next. It’s going to get out of hand. Your reputation will be wrecked. Besides, has she ever saved one of those things?”

“What do you mean, ‘saved’?”

“Repaired it so she could let the damn thing go. No, the answer is no, she has not. Because everything she’s got is missing something which it needs. If she wasn’t eight years old, she’d realize this. Half those birds she’s got in there go around in circles or tip over backwards because their backs are broken. You can’t release a one-eyed hawk. Those poisoned things she gets, she’s just torturing them. Their guts are moldering. Does she know the slightest thing about biology? About science? She should be playing with dolls. Or just getting over playing with dolls, though I’ll admit I don’t know how that works, I have two boys myself. Sons,” he said for added emphasis.

Stumpp regarded him silently. “Let’s move back to your office,” he said.

En route, they passed Emily, hauling something heaving beneath a towel in a small red wagon. She opened the door to her section, struggled through with her charge, and shut the door behind her.

Stumpp grinned and shook his head with happiness. He was enchanted by Emily Bliss Pickless. Wry little elf singing, dancing to itself. Though not exactly. That always finds and never seeks … but that was sentimental doggerel. Pickless was more than that, made of sturdier stuff. Tyke had depths unplumbed — he’d bet his bonds on it. She kept a little diary, not the ordinary childish thing with a little lock and key but a sheaf of pages in a box with a screwed-down lid that required two different screwdrivers. He adored her.

In the taxidermist’s office, Stumpp seated himself in the swivel chair behind the desk. “Why’d you throw this little gorilla away?” he asked.

“That kid probably pushed it in there,” the taxidermist said.

“Needs considerable more work,” Stumpp said. “Mouth in particular. Mouth looks like an omelet or something.”

“That kid needs to know some boundaries,” the taxidermist said. “Some rules need to be laid down. Whatever that little girl is doing — and God knows what it is — it doesn’t coincide with my work at all. We don’t complement one another one bit. It’s a confusing situation. People come in here now, and they get confused.”

“You’re the best there is, aren’t you?” Stumpp said. “The best in the business.”

“Lucky is the creature that gets as far as me.”

“How did you get into this business, anyway?” Stumpp inquired kindly.

“I’ve been doing it for twenty years,” the taxidermist said, “since I was fifteen. I started out with bats, the only mammal that can fly. Loved doing bats, then kept moving up. I did all the bears in the Kodiak airport.”

Stumpp reflected for a moment on his museum. It was nothing but a catacomb, a charnel house. “You’re fired,” he said.

The taxidermist felt the top of his head horripilating. “I have a contract.”

“That contract’s worthless,” Stumpp said. “You should’ve had a lawyer look it over.”

“I just bought a house here.”

“You might have to think about giving it up. That house might not be yours after all.”

The taxidermist wished it was fifteen minutes ago, before he’d opened his goddamned mouth. This profession was all he knew. The widowed skins. The winnowed skulls. This goneness, his clientele. “What’d I say, boss?” he said. “I didn’t say anything. But I take it back.” He’d picked up a large needle and worked it into the fat part of his own thumb. A thread was hanging out of his hand.

“I say, man, pull yourself together,” Stumpp said. “I’ll pay a year’s salary, but I want you to leave immediately. Remove all personal effects.” He pointed to a coffee mug upon which the likeness of the taxidermist’s next of kin — a grimly smiling woman and two thuggish-looking boys — had been imposed upon the plastic.

Within the hour the removal of the taxidermist from the building had been accomplished, and by closing time Stumpp had quite forgotten the man existed.

“Pickless,” Stumpp said, “I was thinking of shutting this whole operation down for a bit.” They were sitting in the cafeteria, sharing a small stale cookie.

“Good,” Emily said. “Then that’s settled.”

“Sick of the public’s remarks. Sick of hearing them say, ‘They’d be dead now anyway.’ Catch my drift?”

“They say that all the time.”

“Makes them feel better.”

“No reason to make ’em feel better about this place.”

“None,” Stumpp agreed. He had to undo much, had to unknot the past, unknot it …

“Wish I hadn’t eaten that cookie,” Emily said.

“How’s the work going?” Stumpp asked.

“Pretty much as expected.” Emily thought she needed to go on a fact-finding tour. That was what life was, was it not? A fact-finding tour?

“Have to take you back soon,” he sighed. “Backto your momma.” Stupid woman, thought her child was enrolled in summer school. Demanding curriculum, involving nature, computers, sailing. Why not sailing? Could sell the woman anything. Parents these days remarkably lax.

“My momma,” Emily said noncommittally.

Only fly in the ointment, this momma. “Do you want to meet my mother?” Pickless had inquired only yesterday. “Good God, no!” Stumpp had exclaimed. Terrible situation that would be. How to explain self? No way to do it. Didn’t wish this woman any harm, just wished she were on another planet. Shuttled away on one of those great gaming ships wandering through space — free drinks, free food, free chips. Or, if she’d prefer it, a good sanitorium somewhere. White clothes, white bedding, white light, white noise. No expense spared for Momma’s peace of mind. Pickless only eight, clearly a minor, but his own heart pure, would stand up to closest scrutiny. No heart ever purer. Thumping away in his chest, at last showing some commitment. He’d be elated to just sit on a rock in the sun with Pickless. Which was pretty much what he was doing, though they were perched on stools covered in dik-dik hide and bathed in halogen light.

“Do you believe in the story ‘Two by Two’?” Emily inquired.

“Hate it,” Stumpp said, surprising himself with his rancor. Pickless should be sufficient unto self. World leader, getting things done. Power of personality. Charisma. Blinded ordinary people into perceiving her as pipsqueak child. Book he liked by that fine African fellow, van der Post. About Blady. Blady the plow horse, discovered in a field by the right passerby, when rescued, becomes champion jumper. In the blood. Instinct, grace, like the tyke. Plus that propensity for fortuitous chance. Blady no nag, just waiting to be beheld in the proper light. Chance is what gets the damn thing done. The role accident assumes in life cannot be overestimated, and Pickless had the gift for accident. Now it was time to cut those corners, cut them. Had to crunch time now. Have to be unconscious, pre-conscious. That’s when great feats were performed. All in the past. Stones of Henge, pyramids of Egypt, ziggurats of Sumer, temples of Teotihuacán. No fatigue or reflection, no doubt. Just action action action.

Emily felt a little sleepy. She was demanding of herself full and chaotic days that reflected neither rhyme nor motive.

Practically had the Dalai Lama on his hands here, but not in some airy-fairy sense. Nothing airy-fairy about Pickless. Nerves of steel. Would get over keeping those mangled things in boxes, just a phase. But no time for many more phases. Time running out. In a sense we’re all already dead. We are. Shouldn’t think so much. Thought supposed to be preferable to unconsciousness but develops its own problems. When thought first appeared, early thinkers believed they had to pluck out their eyes in order to do it properly. Shows how far we’ve gone, but further to go still. Something better than thought out there. Pickless had work ahead, no doubt about it. Must sense no limits. All things possible, otherwise why generation after generation? Still, wished they’d shared a bit of the past together. Wished she’d known Africa. Remembered the nights there, all nights the same then, all the creatures’ eyes glinting visible in the meadow beyond the camp, in the meadow beyond.… Wasn’t this wonderful, he’d be saying to her.…

Emily suppressed a yawn.

41

Corvus was in her sleeping bag in the corner. Both girls had sleeping bags that could maintain life’s functions down to twenty degrees below zero, which Alice thought was excellent if unnecessary to present circumstances. They didn’t cost any more than the ones that only worked down to zero, although Alice admired the kind of person who would risk one of those instead. When self-preservation became overly important, you were doomed. When you began making sacrifices toward security, you were lost, lost, lost.

Alice watched Corvus closely. It had been some time since Corvus had said anything. Her hair was dry and stuck up at odd angles.

“I think we should get out in the here and now,” Alice said. “Drive around in your truck and carpe diem.” Sherwin had told her that she gave the carpe diem concept a bad name. She’d been thrilled by this mis-judgment but was avoiding the piano player nonetheless. Mr. V. was giving a party tonight that she was also avoiding. From now on she would just step nimbly out of Sherwin’s way at every opportunity. He could talk about the blackness of white to someone else. He could ask another to tub cuddle. She was no longer impressionable. Being in love had been interesting, but not exactly, and she wouldn’t want it to happen again. As an inappropriate love object, Sherwin had been practically perfect, but she had to move on.

Corvus’s eyes were open. She cleared her throat softly. “I …” she began.

Alice waited anxiously, encouraged. I … Who knew what it meant exactly, but it indicated that Corvus still knew how to disengage herself from the unconsciousness she preferred. She had inched out a bit from the sleeping bag’s cocoon. These things were actually sort of malevolent-looking, Alice thought.

“I was in a tree,” Corvus said, “between the branches of a tree, and this voice was saying ‘I hold you lightly between two fingers, and if you disobey me I will drop you.’ ”

“Wow,” Alice said. “Who … what does it say you’re supposed to obey?”

“That wasn’t clear. It pretty much stresses the holding lightly part.” She cleared her throat again.

“I’m glad you’re awake. You’ve been sleeping for days. Why don’t we get out of here and camp in the Airstream for a while? We could hook it up to the truck and even go someplace.”

“The Airstream’s still here?”

“It’s parked in the side yard,” Alice said. Was it indeed in the side yard? Had the bad boys wearied of harvesting her granny and poppa’s unkempt vegetation to supply the demanding clean urine market and decided to employ themselves more traditionally by simply stealing things?

“I haven’t seen the Bubble for a while,” Corvus said. “I’d kind of forgotten about it.”

“Well, it’s right outside,” Alice said worriedly.

“I’ve been everywhere these last few days,” Corvus said. “I never want to travel again.”

“I just want to make sure it’s there,” Alice said. “I’ll be right back.”

Silence crept up on Corvus again, encircling her. She’d been dreaming too of a great racetrack enveloped in fog, a light on a great stanchion burning in but not through the fog. People thronged the course. A laconic voice said, The field is in motion. She was not of the race. She was alone, watching it. Innumerable millions, the voice said. She felt the fog lingering, dissolving on her face. Again she was weeping.

She crawled out of the sleeping bag and stood up, then walked unsteadily down the little hall to the bathroom. She wore a shirt of her father’s. Fury gazed at her without moving. Everything had been scaring the soup out of him for days. Who was that now? He was too anxious to bark, and what was the use, anyway, what was the use of sounding the alarm?

Beyond the thin, aqueous-colored wall she heard Alice’s poppa saying, “They don’t use the word used anymore. With cars it’s preowned. With books, preread. With clothes what would you say, preoccupied?” Around her on the shelves were the old people’s innocent salves and potions, their eyewashes and aspirins and expectorants, their Q-tips and Vicks and Pond’s, their flannel cloths and boxes of Endangered Species Band-Aids. The shower curtain hung before the tub on a crooked suction-cupped rod featuring grand, Rubenesque ladies gazing in a sultry manner out at the toilet, which had a puffy-lidded seat the color of charlotte russe.

It all was sadness, every bit of it, the purchasing and placing alike.

On the shelf was a little black comb, an old person’s comb, sincere and ready to work, hardened dandruff high up in the tines. Corvus regarded it for some time. Then her eyes fell on a nail brush, and she ran water and used it to scrub the comb. Dark particles fell onto the sink’s white surface, small particles, but not extremely small. The universe supposedly had come into being in the form of an extremely small particle containing space and time. Or through an event, was the newest theory, and, lacking form of any kind, contained the genesis for space and time though not, in the beginning, space and time itself. The elegance of the newest theory consisted in the admission that there was no beginning. This was debunked by more ambitious theoreticians.

The black flakes stopped falling. The comb now appeared a lovely shining thing. Ace, by name. A particle. An atom. A jot.

She would like to devote herself to such small, foolish good works, to have nothing, to labor in a job without honor, purposelessly, without contrition, for years. Each day the same though not the same, day after obsolete day in infinite vocation. The secretive thread of the weeks. She would labor unconjoined. She would not be remembered.

Corvus went barefoot down the hallway, past Alice’s room, past the living room where Alice’s poppa’s face was bathed in the television’s ashen glow. “Hello there,” he called. Alice’s granny was preparing snacks in the kitchen. “Who’re you talking to, dear?” she said. He saw no one now. He’d been seeing more phantasms than usual of late. Maybe he should put a hold on those cheesy snacks of Ritz and cheddar, the most daring offering they made to one another these days, miniature Grim Reapers, little artery-wadding missives, Belial buttons on a chipped floral plate. But he liked them.

Outside, there was still some daylight not yet squandered, but the big crime lights on the concrete phone poles were shining regardless. The street was lined tightly with vehicles, though no car passed. Corvus’s Dodge truck was at the curb fifty yards away. She softly passed the Airstream on her thin light feet. The door was open, and she glimpsed Alice moving about inside. It looked all jumbled up in there, a-tilt and a-scatter, and Alice was bent over a bowl, about to pick it up.

Corvus padded down the sidewalk. It was smooth and wide, and profane suggestions in both Spanish and English were etched on each square, the words in cramped unhurried script, as though copied from some holy guide instead of being its own screaming, shit-streaked cabala. She reached the truck. Someone had sideswiped the door and she couldn’t open it, so she opened the passenger door and slid across the seat. She pulled out, shifting slowly, no thought arising, to Green Palms.

Nurse Daisy stood outside, smoking a cigarette and cooling her forehead with a moist baby wipe.

“Catachresis is the word of the day,” she said to Corvus in greeting. “It was yesterday’s word as well and, most probably, tomorrow’s. It should be emblazoned on the pediments of this place. Catachrestic. Catachrestical. Catachrestically. The sound alone’s enough to have one running for the exits. There’s a rattle to it, a yeomanly phlegm. Its root means ‘against what is necessary.’ But try using it in a sentence. It won’t fit. Resists the long thought. Nurse Cormac ran off with the exterminator. Those exterminators can talk rings around most people, and she fell for him hard.”

She had drawn the cigarette right down to the filter and now placed it in a sand-filled urn among a good hundred others. “I sometimes think of freshening this up, raking the sand tidy with a fork, lightly sketching a pattern of wings in the Gnostic manner. I never will, of course, because I like it this way too. Not doing one thing is equal to not doing something else. Who said the following? ‘Love, and do what you will.’ ”

Corvus cleared her throat but didn’t speak. Corvus, barefoot, in her father’s shirt, her hair unwashed.

“We have a new neighbor in my neighborhood.” Nurse Daisy pulled out a fresh baby wipe from a packet and rubbed it over her temples. “It’s a pet drop-off bin. People can drop off unwanted dogs and cats in specially marked bins. It’s rather like a mail chute, which will accept animals up to fifty pounds. They drop down softly into a concrete chamber, which is checked and emptied once a day. They’re kept for four days at the shelter, where they’re offered the opportunity for another life in the form of a stranger coming in, though as you know there are never enough strangers. On the fifth day, bright and early, before the sun comes up, before the water dish has to be filled again, there’s sodium Pentothal, quick-quick-quick. It’s a humane alternative. There’s disease out there, worms, blindness, mange, valley fever. There’s neglect and random cruelty. There are designer poisons that take days to work their way through the system. How would you define,” Nurse Daily asked, “the word humane?”

Two wraiths pottered out onto the balcony above them and dawdled, scratching their arms. Corvus could hear the rasp of their dry skin.

“I know how you got this far,” Nurse Daisy said. “You figured out what you ought not to do, and you determined to do it. Against all advice. Not against the odds, however. The odds were always good. But to serve is not to love, you know. You could be washing old feet from now till doomsday, and there’ll still be that hard dark little seed of doubt, that seed of awareness that isn’t love.”

The wraiths looked down on them with immense eyes. They scratched.

“I hope you don’t think you’ve been chosen,” Nurse Daisy said.

Corvus said nothing.

“I would rather speak five words with my understanding than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue, as the Good Book says. But you understand nothing, so you’ve decided to be dumb, and how long will this last, forever?” She looked out at Corvus from deep within her mismatched face. “Nurse Cormac was such a talker. My ears still ring from her prattle.” She touched her tiny ears, which looked as though they’d been grafted on in some long-ago emergency operation by an inappropriate donor. “Winging her way to Kansas, she is, with her exterminator. Back to the seemingly endless plains where he was partly raised, back to the rats in the silos who were missing their master, missing his particular etiquette with them.”

One of the wraiths was scratching his white arm with a card, an efficient scraping that sounded different from the other’s ragged nails. Then the card tore free and fell like a dart at Corvus’s feet. A Happy Birthday card with balloons on it, much thumbed and twisted. Inside, someone had written, “From all of us.” The wraith leaned over the balcony railing, gesturing wildly, and commenced to cry. The other wraith began blubbering as well. “Hey!” Nurse Daisy screamed. They both fell silent and stared at Corvus resentfully.

“They can’t see you, of course,” the nurse said. “Most everyone in this residence has the dark water in their eyes, glaucoma. They only pretend to see you. It’s much like life here, but it’s not life and that’s why you came back. Because you were going to leave us, weren’t you? You were that close to leaving, but then — let me guess — you saw some cruddy thing that had within it all the importunate treasure of being, some cruddy thing that turned radiant in the light of your regard. So you’ve come back to wait without waiting, as one waits for the dead. You’re not one of those signs-and-wonders girls; you’ll have nothing to teach, you’ll serve in silence, you’ll get the dark water yourself, you’ll labor undetected, they’ll bury you out of this place like some failed old postulant.”

The card beamed up at Corvus, its little back cracked. From all of us!

“That funny friend of yours,” Nurse Daisy continued, “does she know about your decision? What a funny friend. She would’ve dissuaded you if she were able, but she’s not able enough. Solitude is no refuge for the rebellious. She would never begin her search here. And if we’re not what we will become, what are we, then?”

Corvus stood motionless. The evening’s small moths dabbled around her.

“It’s better to be dumb,” the nurse said, “than to speak from a heart that’s all darkness and distraction. I’m agreeing with you. I suppose we should go in. Are you ready to enter our little charnel community, not as docent or guide but as a living member? Do you vow to keep your wits among the witless? Do you commit yourself to pondering ceaselessly the uselessness of caring, the uselessness of love, that great reality for which all else must be abandoned?” She stood and seemed to lunge toward Corvus, but it was just one of the heels on her sensible shoes skidding, no harm done.

“I’m not glad you came,” Nurse Daisy said. “If I were the wishing sort, I’d have wished otherwise, for your sake. But I haven’t wished for anything for years and years.”

CAUTION:

DOORS SWING OUTWARD

They passed the children’s drawings on the wall. Pigs, cows, and bears. Wolves and butterflies. Birds, lots of birds.

“Scant comfort, the gullibility of children,” Nurse Daisy remarked. “It’s completely cynical, this continuous peddling of the natural world. It’s not out there anymore! Even old-timers don’t find anything familiar in this empty symbolizing, this feckless copycatting.”

She looked at Corvus. “I’d wager that as a child you colored between the lines. And where has it gotten you?”

There was a newly empty room. In fact, an aide was still washing down the plastic sealing the mattress; some still bright flowers were tumbled in a cardboard carton along with rubber gloves and the menu for the week. “I want to go hommmmmme,” Nurse Daisy mimicked softly. “Thirty-one months, every waking minute, not one bloody, blessed other phrase.”

Fluorescent brightness gnawed at the room. The aide swiped the mattress with a lavender sponge. There was a fuzzy slipper in the carton, a paper roll of pennies, not filled entirely, maybe thirty cents’ worth. Corvus looked at all this from not far away, drifting, with the raven’s eye.

The nurse scooped up the coin roll and dropped it into the pocket of her smock, which shone dully as though waxed. “It costs more to make pennies than they’re worth, but the utterly useless exerts a sobering restraint upon society. If I have a penchant for anything, I believe it’s for useless things.”

The aide pressed fresh sheeting onto the bed and steered the carton into the hall with her foot. In the quiet, Nurse Daisy’s breathing seemed to hiss a little. “Each room a palimpsest,” she said. “I’m self-obliged to tell you, this place may not always be here for you. It’s under investigation by the state. It’s not just the dog meat, the trifecta tostadas, it’s a number of things across the board. Records aren’t being kept, bums aren’t being scoured properly. Rat tails have been observed in the darndest places. Thus the exterminator’s eventful arrival. As for the doctors, they’re comically unqualified. Indeed, they’re not even doctors, not even vets; they’re handymen, gardeners. Death was once frequently portrayed as a gardener in serious verse. One of the problems with our technological age is that we can’t picture death as a gardener anymore, or picture it as anything. A straight line on a screen is the best we can do.…”

She paused, and again Corvus could hear the rasping hitch in her breathing. She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. The horror of the orifice, its foolish greed, seemed apparent to her, its ardent deceptions and ambitions.

“You will make this your oratory,” Nurse Daisy determined.

Corvus searched within herself. She had no intention of praying. But here she would hone her willingness to suffer, make it an ability, a feat no one would acknowledge or admire, least of all herself.

“You think you’ve found sanctuary here, but the whole place is closer than you think to being condemned, the whole kit and kaboodle. It will be turned into another desert spa. Loofah treatments, bikini waxes, energizing soaks. The quick will take it by privilege, storm it by entitlement. The new administrators will be utterly disapproving of your role. You’ll be exiled once more, yet unable to wander like your funny friend. Of course she’s doomed to wander, she has no choice. You’ll grow further and further apart, you two, or perhaps it’s closer and closer apart. Two halves of the same broken shell. Hell has no birds, it’s one of its more alarming attributes. Do you believe me?”

She stared at Corvus. Her lopsided face narrowed and grew taut. “You’re a bit of deadwood, you are, a fruitless tree, fit only to be rooted up and cast into the fire.” She smoothed her chalk-bright uniform, which she preferred to more casual attire. “I’d kiss you good night, but I don’t want to frighten you.”

“You don’t frighten me,” Corvus said.

42

Sherwin was a great observer at parties. Never drinking himself, he had a great advantage, but the sound was beginning to get to him. It actually began to pain him, the sound of a party, the bedlam rattle and howl, the partygoers’ faces opening and emptying and moist with excitement. Sherwin was becoming a little prim about it, and it was affecting his playing. He should do something else. Move to a metropolis or get another face-lift.

He moved from “I Get a Kick Out of You” to Haydn’s Sonata in E-flat Major, which he played badly. “The underclass is menacing,” a man said. “I don’t care how well we seem to get along waiting in line at the Dairy Queen.” Sherwin continued to softly crucify Haydn. “I mean, what are you supposed to get your mother after all these years? I got her a couple dung bunnies. They’re little bunny figures made by Amish craftsmen from sanitized, deodorized, hundred percent cow manure. She can put them in her garden.” Sherwin threw back his head and exaggerated his technique. “My wife’s going to call Victoria and tell her she’s letting me go. Victoria insisted that my wife make this call. She wants everything clear, she’s a helluva girl.” Sherwin started to play Haydn well, just because he could. “What happened to furniture? Don’t they do furniture anymore, the Amish?” A woman approached the piano. Her lips were chapped beneath bright lipstick. She had a small black mole on her throat.

“Nice beauty mark,” Sherwin said.

“You think so?” She nibbled at the lip of her champagne flute.

“Is it real?”

“Real?” She seemed genuinely puzzled by the inquiry, then drained the flute. “Who do you tell your troubles to?” she said. “I’m just curious. I don’t want to hear them myself, but I’d like to know. I tried to tell mine to my dog, and she growled at me. I lay down beside her and I put my arms around her neck and I snuggled up to her and cried in her fur and told her my troubles and she growled at me.”

“What a bitch,” Sherwin said, pecking away at the Haydn. He cocked his head like a feckless little sparrow. Realizing he was overdoing it. One of these days he was going to get knocked on his ass by a broad like this.

“The hell with it,” the woman said. “Nobody likes to hear your troubles, not even a goddamned dog from the pound who should be grateful for every breath she’s allowed to draw.”

“We should all be grateful,” Sherwin said in his oiliest manner. “We are here to praise, to sing our little song of praise.”

The woman regarded him. Her hands shook. She was really very drunk. “I know everybody in this room,” she said. “And you know what I see when I look at them? I don’t see anybody I know.”

“What are your troubles, anyway, dear?” Sherwin asked.

“I’m a survivor,” she said. “People dismiss me as a survivor. They say, ‘That Adrianna, she’s a survivor,’ but they don’t say it in a nice way. It has a lot of negative connotations the way they say it.”

“You’ve been through a lot, have you, dear?” Sherwin had stopped playing, he couldn’t quite recall when.

“Oh, fuck off,” the woman said. She made a crooked way across the room on her battered high heels.

No way that mole was real, Sherwin thought. He was losing more and more of his already limited ability to extend himself to others. He should get an eye-lift, maybe, or go back to school, live in the city and study philosophy. Read Schopenhauer again. He loved Schopenhauer. There was a man who had the ability to extend himself to others. Hadn’t people gathered each midday outside his favorite hotel to watch him eat? To him they were nothing, everything was nothing, but they were all crazy about him, even the women, who were forever approaching him, wanting to be seen with him, attempting to ingratiate themselves with his white poodle; there was always a white poodle, a succession of white poodles. The children of the neighborhood called the poodle “young Schopenhauer”—they had his number, yet everyone else adored him, not the complacent, egotistical, and cold man that was Schopenhauer but his thinking. His “the way of escape is not by the way of death” was the most delightful suggestion. To escape the fuss and pain and striving and confusion of trying to live, fully or interestingly or just at all, to escape all that through self-destruction, though not through the gate of death …

“How about playing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’? You know ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’?” A young man wearing a squash blossom necklace the size of a softball was looking at him with shy concern. He wore soft pleated trousers and a muscle shirt.

“You want ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’?”

“I’ve been asking,” the youth said.

“I love ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’,” Sherwin said. “It just goes on and on.”

The youth’s friend materialized beside him. “Well, play the goddamn thing then,” he said. The two of them could be twins, but this one was shaggier, coarser. Cute, Sherwin thought.

“I was just about to take a break,” Sherwin said. “It’s break time. I wouldn’t want to play it when my heart wasn’t in it.”

“You should get a new personality,” the rough one said. “Yours is just about worn out.” He was looking pointedly at Sherwin’s tuxedo jacket, which was, in fact, a little shabby. Sherwin had four of them, all in barely presentable condition.

“It’s not that easy, pretty,” the muffin one said. “You’re very skilled at it, but most people wouldn’t know where to begin getting a new personality.” He put his hand on his lover’s arm.

Sherwin sensed great animosity toward his person tonight. Perhaps his true self, usually so carefully concealed, had become visible, and instead of being remarkable resembled a little speckled stone that kept presenting itself to be kicked. People mostly left him alone. Or avoided him, whatever. But he was having a problem tonight. His friend Jasper, who was having a problem with brain lesions, who was dying, actually, had said, “Now, Win, when you’ve got a problem, don’t think of it as such. Think of it as a mystery, then it’s not a problem anymore but a lovely mystery.”

Someone in the vicinity was saying, “If we can get enough people in that subdivision, there’ll be enough effluent to support a golf course.”

The rough darling was giving Sherwin a big murderous smile. His left incisor had been sharpened to quite a point. Sherwin missed being in love, the danger and stupidity of it. He walked outside and lit a cigarette. My self, he thought, a little speckled stone. Weren’t there screaming stones somewhere? Probably in Celtic lands. They screamed when something bad was about to happen, some avoidable catastrophe poised to occur.

The woman with the rucked heels and sticker mole was lying on a chaise longue, her eyes closed and her hands folded over her stomach. Some people passed out like that, just had the knack of doing it in a formal fashion.

Sherwin walked around smoking. The party had reached that warbling keen, the trilling glossolalia he knew so well and detested. He saw what appeared to be a buzzard just before the curve in the driveway and flicked his cigarette at it. It dragged itself off a bit. A buzzard and something wrong with it to boot. He regretted throwing the cigarette. That had been unkind. He lit another and leaned on the haunch of a red Mercedes convertible whose bumper sticker declared, “My Friend Was Killed by a Drunk Driver.” Person always had to have a certain kind of face on when driving that car. They must have another car they drove when they wanted to relax. Could this belong to the woman who’d passed out, the survivor who couldn’t even get her dog to listen to her troubles? Did Schopenhauer tell his problems to his poodles? Maybe that’s why he had a succession of them. Let me just run this past you … Human life has no goal, nor could the goal be reached even if it existed. Sound right to you?

That was the problem, the dilemma, Jasper was attempting to turn into such a delightful mystery at Green Palms. He had told Sherwin he was committed to conscious dying; he was sure he could make a go of it. You’ve got to go on a tour of unaccustomed thinking, Jasper said. If you’re willing to take the tour, then … What? Sherwin had asked. What then? Anything can happen, Jasper said. That’s all? Sherwin said. That’s enough to make me laugh. Anything can happen? That’s all you get for going on this tour? Jasper had never been congenial or hopeful, and now he was; it was terrible timing. His skin was sallow and his feet were bloated and gray, the long thick nails curving downward almost like a bird’s talons. He couldn’t bear the slightest pressure on his feet, not even a sheet; the breath of a door closing, a breeze, was agonizing beyond endurance. Sometimes the two of them would lose themselves for long moments, regarding Jasper’s feet. Fissures would appear, exposing a slice of shining liquid, or a bruise, a black aureole, would be born. The feet seemed to want to possess a life independent of Jasper, who they possibly and quite rightly felt was going to quit them soon.

I’ll be the first one to die consciously, Jasper assured him. Others have tried and failed, but I’m not going to fail. I think you have to start practicing for this moment at an early age, Sherwin said. Before I came here and was in the hospital there was this kid there, Jasper said. I never met him, he was in pediatrics and they wouldn’t let me near pediatrics, but he was seven years old and he was going to die and his wish, his only wish, was to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. I didn’t think that was even published anymore, Sherwin said. The record he was going for was to possess the largest collection of business cards by any individual on earth. Boxes were set up all over the hospital for people to drop their business cards in, to help this deluded kid meet his goal. I just wanted to find him and shake him, you know? That kid made me so angry, and the people who encouraged him in this … this project made me even angrier. They should’ve been helping him to die consciously. That might be hard for a little kid, Sherwin said. Yeah, to give him the benefit of the doubt, seven’s a funny age, Jasper said. Even so, I just wanted to shake him; and that wasn’t doing me any good, you know. Dying’s like any other job, it’s important to do it right. You’ve got to purify yourself. Maintain a schedule. With a schedule it doesn’t seem so bad. On Jasper’s schedule was a visit to the coast. He wanted cold seawater poured over his head, flattening his hair, chilling his scalp. He wanted the feel of that. They had to let him fly out to the coast, come back, it could be done, it wouldn’t even take a day. This place is full of dying people, you know, this place I’m in, Jasper said, and none of them is going to die aware because they’re so old and they don’t have the strength for it. But I am because I’m young, Win, I’m young.

You’re going to make me cry, baby, Sherwin said. But he didn’t feel close to crying. He didn’t even know why he came to visit Jasper. They’d had some good times once.

If you were me, I don’t think I’d stay with you like this, Jasper said. It’s awfully nice of you to visit me.

You wouldn’t stay with me? Sherwin said, professing anguish.

I don’t think so. I probably wouldn’t, Jasper said. I don’t like sick people.

Jasper faded in and out. He was struggling against it. He thought he was doing it in a new way.

I want to be good at this, Win. All these people here, they see with their memories. It’s no good, Win.

I thought you were supposed to make nice memories, Sherwin said. I thought that was the point.

I asked my aunt to put my years and my months and my days on my marker, Jasper said. Do you think she’ll do that?

I don’t know from aunts.

They don’t do it so much anymore, the months and the days. Jasper blinked his eyes several times. I’m going to change the subject. I’m announcing this so you’ll know I’m doing it deliberately, that it’s not like a weird mental convulsion I’m having. I’m doing this consciously. I don’t think my voice sounds right. I’ve got to concentrate. Maybe you should go.

Sherwin undesirable even here at deathside; it was humiliating. Sherwin began feeling sorry for himself. No, I’m going to stay with you, baby.

Jasper looked upset, as though Sherwin were insisting on going into a party where people would think they were a couple.

Sherwin laughed. I know what you’re thinking, baby.

Jasper raised his hand and smashed it all about in the air around his head. That’s not possible, he said.

I’m loathsome, aren’t I, Sherwin said, but didn’t we have some good times together?

I’m not having a retrospective here. I don’t want a retrospective. This is the tour now proceeding forward. I’m taking the tour by myself. Am I making sense? Is my voice all right? I don’t want you. I never wanted you.

You’re lovely and lucid, baby, Sherwin said. I never thought we were more than friends.

You’d like to exchange places with me, but you can’t.

That’s what I want, Sherwin said, to exchange places.

You’ll die someday, Jasper said. Fuck up your own death, don’t try to fuck up mine.

Spittle poured from the corners of Jasper’s mouth. He fumbled for a tissue in his bathrobe pocket and mopped at it. It’s the medication, he said.

Before Green Palms, when Jasper had been in the hospital, the doctors had opened up his head, looked inside, lay their scalpels down, and closed it up again. We just lay our scalpels down, son. For a while this phrasing had intrigued Jasper. He heard in it some obeisance to the mystery, the beautiful mystery that waited beyond the mere problem.

Sherwin smoked and thought of Jasper, who was probably dead by now, the aunt back in Alexandria thinking, But I don’t want to put on the months and the days. That boy could be so affected sometimes.… For all Sherwin knew, Auntie might have been a figment of Jasper’s lesions. The point was that Sherwin couldn’t even have a conversation with a dying person without getting insulted. Wasn’t being treated with insolence by the dying virtually impossible? And Jasper had been an insecure, unformed youth, still working on his languors and dislikes. They hadn’t known each other to any true degree. Jasper knew nothing of Sherwin’s suicide attempts, but then few did. Even Sherwin wondered how many could be counted as intentional. Sometimes he’d come up with six, sometimes eight, it depended on how inclusive he wanted to be. Do you count as one, for example, the thousand men who’d had you? He didn’t usually count that. He’d thrown himself down a flight of stairs once; cut himself (embarrassing, that one, for they were clearly the cuts of a malingerer); smashed up a few cars (he didn’t drive anymore, having lost confidence in that method); commenced to hang himself but then thought better of it. His most deliberate one was Seconal in the fine hotel: order some room service, masturbate to Pay-per-View, go out in a king-sized bed with a view of the Catalinas. But his vomiting had annoyed the people in the next room (a couple marking their thirtieth wedding anniversary) to such an extent that they called the front desk, and his efforts were thwarted by a pissed-off concierge. He’d never be allowed to play his parasuicide game in that establishment again. The fulfillment of one’s most cherished desire can often founder on one’s choice of means. He couldn’t interest his body in helping him out. It was as though his body was saying, Wait a minute, we’re not through with you just yet. We’ll let you know when it’s time. You have no idea what we have in store for you, you dabbler, you fabricator, you.

Sherwin no longer thought about his suicide stratagems in a responsible, straightforward fashion. He longed for an audience, an audience of one, namely Alice. Why Alice, he wasn’t quite sure. He was a little annoyed with her for losing interest in him, obviously, but that in itself wasn’t enough to propel him toward another attempt. He didn’t construe his attempts as a reaction to anything, had never made even one in response to a particular, dispiriting event. He didn’t want any connection to exist between occurrences in his flimsy life and the suicide act, should it occur. He wanted to deepen the gulf between what he was and the way he behaved. Still, he thought he’d probably been born a suicide, born with the little nothingness gene, the predilection to nothingness. Everyone must have it, it’s just that Sherwin and his kind, or as he like to think of them, his ilk, nurtured and appreciated it and in fact would not be able to live without doting and dwelling on it. The thought of suicide was his passion, his pet, something he shared only with his own starved heart. The little nothingness gene — most people let it atrophy. Or they smothered it with the habit of living and self-interest. But Sherwin kept his in operating condition.

He wished he could get Alice interested. She didn’t have to do it herself — he wasn’t the kind of person who wanted company, exactly — but if she would just apply herself to conversation about it. Still, was there anything more boring than people talking? No, there was not.

He turned back toward the house, went into the kitchen, and ate, in rapid succession, a number of bread rounds topped with tiny, colorful, irrationally wedded and chic foodstuffs.

One of the caterers rapped his knuckles. “Hey, man, slow down. It took me half an hour to put that tray together. Eat some cashews or something.”

“What’s the occasion for this event, anyway?” Sherwin asked sulkily.

“Why should there be an occasion? People have parties.” He shifted the tray out of Sherwin’s reach. “Don’t you have a job to do?”

Sherwin saw the host’s daughter in the corner, flirting cautiously with one of the servers, a boy wearing his hair in a long ponytail.

“Hiya … Annabel,” he said, her name coming to him.

She widened her eyes. The piano player looked so morbid. He was really the strangest person — the pitted skin, the too-black hair, the pale artificial-looking hands. When he wasn’t playing the piano, they just hung there. He was really so ungainly and disturbing. “Jonathan and I were just talking about puns,” she said, “about making puns. Whether that was middle-class or not.”

“Middle-class,” Sherwin pronounced.

“Every single thing you can probably classify whether it is or it isn’t,” Annabel said. “It’s maybe a waste of time, but it’s sort of fun, too, and could help you get organized and maybe save you some time eventually.”

“Do you believe you’re going to be resurrected or reincarnated?” Sherwin asked. “Quick, which?”

Annabel appeared frightened, but the boy looked at Sherwin and said softly, “Resurrected.” She looked at him gratefully.

“But there are rules, the rules being, you’ve got to have all your own parts,” Jonathan continued. “Can’t have artificial organs, grafts, plates, implants, or someone else’s blood in your body at the time of death. I intend to keep to the rules. If you don’t abide by them, I honestly couldn’t tell you what would happen, regardless of your beliefs.” He looked at Sherwin appraisingly, as though to say, You’re just fucked, man.…

Sherwin felt he was being toyed with.

“I’d like to come back as—” Annabel began.

“That’s transmigration,” Jonathan said, “not reincarnation.”

“Oh …” she said.

“But both of those things are voodoo,” the boy said. “Resurrection’s the way to go.”

“Middle-class,” Sherwin opined.

“I’ve got to serve these salmon puffs,” Jonathan confided to Annabel.

“So,” Sherwin said after he’d left, “where’s your friend tonight? That Alice person.”

“She’s either with Corvus or looking for her … whatever, like she usually is.”

“I kind of hoped I might see her here.”

“How old are you?” Annabel asked.

He’d forgotten for a moment what he’d told Alice. He usually told women that he was twenty-eight. He couldn’t get away with that with men. “Twenty-eight,” he said.

“How old really?”

“You’re hurting my feelings,” Sherwin said. In the other room, someone was playing the piano. He might as well not even be here tonight. It was a strange night, the kind of night where thoughts of the immeasurable greatness of the sea that none can cross kept intruding. He liked to keep such thoughts in their place. He didn’t mind entertaining them amusingly while alone but found them formidably undesirable when they accosted him in public. In public, he preferred harboring thoughts of self-destruction, but not of the way-of-death variety.

One of the buttons of his shirt was cracked in half — therefore not qualifying as a button, right? — and Annabel could see his skin, which was watery white. He had to be forty years old, maybe even more. She shuddered. “Never mind,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me how old you are. You’re only as old as you feel.” What did that actually mean? Annabel wondered. She wished she hadn’t said it.

“You don’t want to know anything about me,” Sherwin pouted.

“Oh, I don’t,” Annabel said with great feeling.

“Well, we’re both great fans of Alice.”

“We are?” Annabel said.

Sherwin laughed.

“Alice can be so mean,” Annabel said. “Maybe you don’t know her mean side. Once I said to her, ‘You’re such a septic, Alice,’ and she was all over me because I said ‘septic.’ She’s so vain about language. It was just a little mispronunciation, and she was all over me.”

Sherwin laughed again.

“I don’t think Alice will ever have fans.” Annabel said. If Alice were here, she’d be having a fit about salmon being served. The whole thing about salmon was sort of pathetic. That need to return. And when they did succeed in returning to the place where they had been born or spawned or whatever, didn’t they just rot?… like immediately …

“If you’re not a fan by nature — I don’t mean just a fan of Alice’s, but a fan by nature — then you must be aware of the presence of God.”

“Oh, I can’t — I just can’t talk like this.” Annabel said.

“An awareness of the presence of God enables a person to resist the false values of mass communications, which create fans, enthusiasts, fantasists.”

“I think mass communication is wonderful,” Annabel said. “I think it’s done an awful lot of good.” She had turned quite pale.

“Hey, relax,” Sherwin said. “I’m just kidding around.”

The ponytail had returned to the kitchen, his platter of salmon puffs denuded.

“Jonathan!” she screamed.

“Will you tell Alice I’m sorry I missed her?” Sherwin said.

“Sorry you missed her,” Annabel said. “Certainly.” Is this what they did together, he and Alice? It was sick.

She picked up a little ceramic butter dish, took the top off, and then put it back on. The lid was in the shape of a little hen, and a chick was nestled in the hen’s wing. She had bought it for her mother for Christmas one year and of course her mother had hated it, wanting nothing with the merest whiff of domesticity as a gift. Annabel took the top off again; it fit back only one way. How absorbing this little dish was … she wished Sherwin would leave. She glanced up and saw with relief that he actually was walking away, twitching and rolling his shoulders in the dark tuxedo. He was so odious and incoherent. Someone else was playing the piano anyway. Was he even necessary?

Sherwin passed through the kitchen and slowed but did not stop his passage into the great room, where the guests were still striving toward the party’s high note, which it might not achieve. Madder music was required. He didn’t look at the piano. By the door there was a table in the shape of an elephant. Indian, Sherwin thought. Right? They’re the ones with the smaller ears, the longer face. On top of it was a glass of white wine with an hors d’oeuvre in it, looking for all the world like a turd in a toilet.

Outside, he moved away from the light of the party, down the length of the house. Below, cupped in the valley, the lights of the city trembled, and high up, in further darkness, a greenish wad of light burned solitary and bright — a mine reopened, working out its semiprecious stones. He stood and smoked. Sometimes we exist, he thought, and sometimes we pretend to exist, which takes considerably more effort. He walked to the end of the house. Metal animals were spiked into the decoratively inclined earth as one-dimensional entertainment. A troupe of quail. A life-sized javelina.

He hadn’t realized how big a house it was. One wing angled off westward. The house, subtly, seemed to go on and on. Sherwin grinned and shook his head. It was like the classic dream where you dream there’s one more room to your house — silly me, it’s been there all the while, and what? I’d forgotten? A whole other room! Of course it wasn’t his own house, it was his sometime employer’s house, the man who signed the checks. He touched the handle on a glass door, and it slid back on its tracks with a dry whisper. He patted the wall for a light switch.

It was a bedroom, ornate as the rest of the house but tousled and cold. Cold as a meat locker. There were silk sheets on the bed of a dark rose color. Long mirrors, the kind you attached to the backs of doors, leaned against the walls. Drinking glasses and books scattered about, a few table lamps, the ones with shades as tall as a child. An overhead fan rotated slowly, making the room colder still. Now, this was a room you could go out in, a room that made no bones about it. This would be a room to introduce to Alice.

“ ‘There shall be no sea, they say/On Nature’s great coronation day/when the Bridegroom comes to the Bride’ dum dum dum dum.” But what that meant, of course, was nullity, not the old in-and-out. Maybe he should make a few preparations and come back here to deal himself his blow. Clean his apartment, tell his few remaining acquaintances their failings, get a colonic irrigation.… He picked up the nearest reading material, The Worst Journey in the World, by one Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It had Carter’s bookplate in it. Carter might be a bit of a goose, Sherwin thought.

The Worst Journey in the World was polar in nature, as the worst-journey genre tended to be, and concerned the doomed Antarctic explorer Scott, a figure for whom Sherwin had little empathy. Scott had made it clear in his diaries that although he and his little group (a fateful asymmetrical seven rather than the originally planned-for six) had the means to take their own lives in an emergency, they decided when the last fatal blizzard descended to die naturally. Sort of the let-the-body-deal-with-it-rather-than-the-mind attitude. But their decision to consciously freeze to death was sort of an ultrasuicide. They got foxed.

Sherwin put the book down. He was surprised there wasn’t some porn or some other sign of innocent human diversion. The room eluded him, its destiny seeming a little vague. He couldn’t even hear the party from here.

He switched on the VCR on top of the television set, and Africa bloomed. The veldt. People with remarkable cheekbones. A Land Rover tearing along.

“This is the part that’s always supposed to bring a tear to your eye,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s when they’ve left the lioness for a week and it’s the rainy season and she isn’t able to get anything to eat and she’s half starved. But that’s not the real Elsa there. That’s her stand-in.”

“Jesus! You startled me,” Sherwin said. “My heart went skippety.”

“I loathe that movie,” the woman said. “It’s been in there for a month.” She smiled at him thinly, a hefty broad with sunken eyes wearing some sort of partygoing apparatus with gauzy overlays, the kind hefty broads ofttimes wore. She looked familiar, as though he’d seen her in a photograph somewhere, but a specific photograph, framed.

“So you slipped away from the party, too,” Sherwin said.

“Some time ago,” Ginger said. “Tell me, how did you find your way in here?”

“Yeah, I shouldn’t be here,” Sherwin said. “It’s just one of those nights when I don’t feel at home in my own skin. Whose room is this, anyway?”

“That boob Carter’s.”

“Yeah?” Sherwin said. “He likes Elsa the lioness?”

“If he were hip,” Ginger said, “he’d have a sci fi, horror, and B-and-C flicks library, but Carter is as unhip as it gets.”

She was hefty but rather remarkably bony, too. It sort of came and went.

“The mirrors are a kick.”

“It’s just one of his latest notions. He thinks they’ll bother me, but they don’t.” She bent toward him. “Hi,” she said.

He could see her breastbone, a bony wing. He had a quick recall of his sister, whom he hadn’t thought about in years. After she was diagnosed, his mother insisted she’d caught cancer from eating dirt when she was little, making little cakes and pies out of dirt and pebbles and berries in her playhouse. She’d caught it and held it for ten years and then died when she was seventeen. His mother had kept bees. There was a saying: bees don’t thrive unless they’re told the news. She’d talked to her bees, he remembered, even more after his sister died. She was good with bees, his mother, which was another way of saying she wasn’t all there.

“Whoa,” Sherwin said. “I just thought about some people I hadn’t thought about for a long time.”

This did not engage her interest. “You know, I’m so curious about what people think — and then it’s all so boring. Most of what people think aren’t thoughts, anyway, they’re memories. People treasure a good memory, but the thing you’ve got to realize is if you think about your dead daddy, it doesn’t make him any less dead in his other life.”

Sherwin listened intently.

“You may say, ‘Well I don’t have a dead daddy,’ but many people do, and they think about that dead daddy and delude themselves into thinking they’re keeping him alive somehow by the persistence of their memories. It’s so ridiculous. That’s just one example, I have others. People think memory grants an extension. Memory does not grant extensions.”

Sherwin liked the way she talked. There was something wrong with her, he thought; maybe she’d had a stroke. What did they say the first overt sign of a stroke was? An odd look? She had that, all right. One taco short of a combination plate. “An extension?” He laughed. “An extension of what?”

“You’ve got bad teeth, you know that?” Ginger said. “You should be more discreet about laughing.”

“I’ve got bad teeth?” Sherwin said. “Really?”

“I’m very conscious of teeth,” she said. “You’ve got scoliosis too, it looks like.”

“I hate talking health,” Sherwin said. “You wanna talk about God?”

“Let me tell you something … how can I put this?”

“That’s always the challenge.”

“God sends you after something that isn’t there.”

Sherwin thought about this.

“I wouldn’t smirk if I were you,” she snapped.

“No, no, I like that. We’re all bums on a scavenger hunt.”

“I hate people who take something someone says, then say it in a different, far less interesting way and pretend it’s better. I would never have said that. We are not all bums on a scavenger hunt.”

“Cigarette?”

“Not yet,” Ginger said.

There really was an odd smell in this room. It sort of soaked into you.

“You think I farted, don’t you?” she said. “Well, I didn’t.”

“I don’t for a moment think you farted,” Sherwin said graciously.

“Carter believes I’m shooting breezers, and that’s not it at all.”

She was big. It was an odd sensation. He was, in this sensation, infinitesimally small.

“Why don’t you go find Carter for me and bring him in here?” Ginger suggested. “Tell him that it’s imperative that he come in here with you for a moment.”

“What reason would I give?” Sherwin asked.

“Oh, just say it’s an emergency. Say someone’s hurt or something.”

“Is someone hurt?” He grinned again, covering his mouth with his hand. He liked her, he didn’t want to annoy her. Here was someone who could understand him completely.

“In a manner of speaking,” Ginger said.

“Something could happen in here. I’m agreeing with you.”

“Carter thinks I’m crude. Of course, he never found me welcoming or desirable before, either.”

“He’s a civilian. He’s blind to greatness. You’re a freak, baby. You’re great.”

“And you’re the famous piano player, aren’t you? The one with the little limp-dick death wish.”

This summation of his situation in no way surprised him.

“You’re the plenipotentiary, baby,” Sherwin said. “You’re my girl.”

“Embrace me,” Ginger said, “and I will be beautiful.”

“Be beautiful and I will embrace you. That’s a poem, isn’t it? ‘We argued for hours’? And ‘it turns out to be life’? Is that the one? My mind’s getting shaky.”

She laughed. “No, no, that’s not the one I’m thinking of. Give me a cigarette.” She was laughing at him. Her teeth were great. Good strong teeth.

He shook a cigarette out of his pack, lit it, and held out his hand to present it to her, but she didn’t move, so he took a step forward, then stumbled over something, losing his balance and pitching against one of the leaning mirrors. He turned, twisting, trying to recover, and fell hard against another one, falling harder than he could imagine possible, into the silvering, and felt it break into him, sliding its cool tongues into his hands and throat and heart. He lay on the floor among the glittering, his blood welling and then skimming down the slim nails of glass. He had almost heard the sound of the glass slipping into him, a sound like his father’s shovels slicing into the ground. His father had called himself a tree surgeon, though in fact he had specialized in just cutting them down, taking them down to the stump. He had saws longer than his arms and called them his Bad Boys. Now look at this Bad Boy, he’d say. He kept his tools beautiful, his shovels so sharp a man could shave with them. No dead daddy, he was still alive, wearing out his fourth wife somewhere in the Texas hill country. Such a nice clean sound he’d first heard; but that was past now, replaced by a sloppier, more distracting one, a squeaking and gurgling. Death by mirrors. Cave, Cave, Dominus videt … and Sherwin was showing himself to be a mess.

43

Alice was walking. No place had yet received her, the world proving to be no solace. She had started out just past dawn while her granny and poppa were still murmuring in bed, having already brewed the coffee and fed Fury his applesauce from his favorite bowl, which had the image of a half-naked body builder on the bottom. The house was full of such odd bits of china, but this was clearly Fury’s favorite, always shown to him empty, prior to being filled, so he could know he wasn’t being deceived.

The heat was pure and light, hollow as a bone. She had been setting out each morning for a day of wandering but returned home to her granny and poppa each night. “No bird so wild but has its quiet nest,” as Sherwin would have said, quoting another. Sherwin had been a big quoter. Alice had seen his pockmarked face and bottle-black hair materialize on certain boulders recently when the light was right or, more likely, wrong. It wasn’t as though he’d died instantly, there had been some lag time. The county coroner, who had arrived with the ambulance, was not of the school that fed the foolish hope that a person could die instantly. Neither conciliatory nor compassionate, he had been educated by Jesuits and as such might as well have been raised by wolves. If you’d invited the coroner to imagine that such lag time served a purpose, perhaps by allowing the soon-to-be-deceased an opportunity to plead for nonforgetfulness and the remembrance of past lives in wherever was coming next, he would’ve laughed in your face. He was a regular on a local talk-show channel, and Alice’s granny had described his laugh as infectious.

That elephant had died too, the same evening, the one who painted watercolors. Her keepers had shipped her to Phoenix and bred her there, and her unborn had slipped out of her womb into her abdomen, rupturing the uterine wall. They hadn’t let her paint during pregnancy because they wanted her to focus on raising a calf, they’d denied her paints, brushes, the artist’s life. Ruby was the name her managers had given her. And Ruby had spent her last hours all opened up on a pile of mattresses and inner tubes. She hadn’t liked Phoenix anyway. Who would? Still, she’d had many mourners there. Cheap bouquets piled high against the zoo’s gates. Plush toy elephants. Even a couple of old pianos, “Forgive us” painted on the keys. Candy, conversely, had not been pregnant at all, except hysterically. A combination of hypnotism and pharmaceutical mixing had untethered the imaginary child from her bitter and uncharismatic grasp.

Alice loped through washes and down the cracked beds of scalped rivers; she trotted through barren swales, past yellow earthmoving machines big as stables. Somewhere there was a hidden world, she hoped, closed to observation and obliteration. Closed to memory. Safe.

Annabel had written to her on one of those virtually weightless folds of blue paper where the letter was not enclosed but was the envelope itself. Annabel wrote that she’d had a facial in Paris, and the girl had discovered an imbedded, almost colorless blackhead on her cheek and she couldn’t get it out and couldn’t get it out and Annabel was half frantic with worry and the girl was just about to give up when she got it. Then she’d shouted, “Go, team!” and both of them wept with relief. “Go, team!” the French girl had said. Annabel had found herself quite adept at learning French, but what was the point if the French were learning dumb American phrases as fervently as they could? Annabel had just finished The Stranger in the original.

“Do you know how it begins, Alice?” she wrote. “ ‘Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’ I think there’s a lot more to those first two sentences than most people think. At first I thought I couldn’t go on, but then I whizzed right through it, the whole book. Daddy’s very happy here, and so is Donald, who adores him, hangs on his every word, if you can believe it. He’s forgotten all about Siddhartha. Daddy’s going to buy Donald a vineyard, just a small one. Happiness is the most important thing there is. I’ve had two liaisons already and one affaire de cœur.…”

She had asked about Alice’s new tooth but had not inquired after Corvus. There was more, written in the margins, but Alice didn’t read it. She preferred not finishing something to having it end on its own terms.

She perched on a shelf of shale near a pack rat’s impressive mound of cholla joints and stared down at Mr. V.’s vacated house. Mr. V. had practically teleported Annabel and Donald out of there after Sherwin’s accident. “Sliced to ribbons” was the accepted phrase. By slicing himself to ribbons, Sherwin seemed to have provided a conduit of escape for the others, as though he’d been sacrificed or something. Still, it had worked out well enough. He wasn’t living anyway, not really, and he had been tiresomely, peevishly aware of this for some time. But now that he was gone, he seemed more a strange thought she’d had than anything. He’d be the first to be amused by this, the first and maybe only. She could hear him say, Why, Alice, you are empathetic.

The house was empty, the pool drained. Everything had been auctioned off to benefit Mr. V.’s bill at the Hilton. He’d given the Corvette to the bartender, the piano to the suite’s maid. Peeled of familiarity, the house looked a blind and formless thing. A realtor’s sign glinted in the sun. Swaying on two little hooks beneath it was a cylinder that was supposed to provide information sheets, but there was nothing in it. Alice had looked. Now, from a distance, she gazed down at the house. Even the Indian was gone, and the chair he’d been placed in. At that very moment, some states and days removed from and unrealized by Alice, actual Indians were playing buffalo. They were making an attempt to dance the buffalo back into being — sticks shoved through their shoulder blades, bleeding, atoning, serving, pretending to be. A dance that hadn’t been danced in a hundred years was now being rebroadcast. “Alicekins would enjoy this, wouldn’t she?” her poppa was saying.

The emergency vehicles had certainly made a mess of the landscaping out here. On further reflection, Alice concluded it was cactus thieves who had struck. A large columnar cereus was just gone, off to a new decorating role in Palm Springs. Sophisticated burglars taking advantage of an ascendant retro surge had hit the place hard. There were holes everywhere.

Nothing stirred. Life was not obvious. The pack rat’s spiny pile was festooned here and there with bottle caps and the blue plastic rings that had once ensured the purity of jugged water. The rat had to bear the burden of its incorrect name, for it was not genus Rattus at all although often slandered as such. Shy and misunderstood as it was, it must have been immensely pleased with the construction, which even included a tube of lipstick, Mrs. V.’s lipstick so recently enshrined by Annabel. Mrs. V. was stubborn — still being represented in this practically nowhere by this tube she had known, golden without, and within horribly crimson and waxily collapsed. Alice hoped Mr. V. had gone far enough away for happiness. And she hoped he wasn’t eating veal over there, though this was unlikely, given the penchant of the French. They even ate horses. She should send him a little note, something fun, not too didactic: A HEART ATTACK IS GOD’S REVENGE FOR EATING HIS LITTLE FRIENDS. She didn’t want to be informed that he’d had a heart attack, of course.

I shouldn’t come out here after today, she thought. She felt a certain misalignment regarding herself and her life. A misalignment could make a big difference.

She had gone to Green Palms on the first of the days, and Nurse Daisy had appeared at the door.

“You look like you’ve got the flu,” she said. “We can’t expose our residents to random bugs that might carry them away sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t have the flu,” Alice said.

“People deny, they conceal, they prevaricate. I’ve heard it all.”

Inside, they were tossing a beach ball around a circle. Singing silly love songs. Getting their diapers changed.

“You’ve got something,” Nurse Daisy said, “and it’s not acceptable here. Go away, now. Shoo. Shoo!”

“I’m looking for Corvus.”

“You always are. That’s not her name anymore. She received a different name. What did you call your first little pets? Tyger? Domino? Don’t you wish you were a little kid again?”

“Not really,” Alice said.

“Your mind developing. You’d be two, then four. What a difference. People who cared would be thrilled at your progress. Those false-belief tests. You’d bring up your scores, eventually.”

“What’s a false-belief test?”

“Sally puts a chocolate in a box, then leaves the room. June comes in, takes the chocolate out of the box, puts it in a basket. Sally comes back. Where will Sally look for her chocolate? A two-year-old, a three-year-old will point at the basket, because that’s where the chocolate is, but you won’t. You’ll be four. You’ll point at the box. Theory of mind. Shows you’re capable of simultaneously conceiving of and appreciating two alternative and contradictory models of reality. And it just gets better and better for a time when you’re a little kid. The capacity to change nervous pathways — that is, to learn — seems unlimited. But then the changing slows, even stops. And all that’s left is to get pig sick of things.”

They were playing with their fruit cups on trays locked in place, the syrup too thick for their old throats. They were stroking the wheels of their chairs.

Alice could see them, dimly.

“You never long to be a little child again? Because look at you now, an odd one, one from whom love and participation are not particularly desired.”

“You can’t hold Corvus in here,” Alice had said. “There are rules.”

Nurse Daisy’s jaw dropped. Rules, she mouthed. Alice almost turned to look behind her, for it seemed that the nurse was projecting to a distant, disbelieving audience.

“You must stop trying to impose yourself on that girl,” Nurse Daisy said. “ ‘Sit in your cell, and your cell will tell you everything.’ That’s something she’s learned and you never will.”

Inside, their names were posited in ink upon the collars of their clothes. Someone, something, was combing their old hair.

“This is not a nunnery,” Alice said.

“It’s a sexless place of contemplation. Don’t pick nits.”

“Corvus doesn’t want to be in a nunnery.”

“You’ll never know. You are not her! Maybe you wouldn’t score that nicely on the false-belief test. Maybe you’d keep going for that basket, much to everyone’s disappointment.”

Alice frowned. “Please,” she said, “I want to see Corvus.”

“Don’t demean yourself with pleading,” Nurse Daisy snapped. “Why do you always have to look at everything twice in order to see it? The short prayer penetrates Heaven, they say, but any fool can see this isn’t Heaven here. Your friend’s disappointed you. Think of it that way if it will make you feel better.”

“I’m a volunteer,” Alice said. “I can come inside.” Nurse Daisy firmly shut and locked the door.

Vexed, Alice had begun to walk, then run the four miles to the Wildlife Museum, with the vague intent of making a ruckus, of unroutine sabotage. But how could one sabotage death all doubled back upon itself, presenting itself so breathlessly intact? Still, she thought she’d knock some things over, rail at the paying customers, make them reflect on the transaction they were engaged in.

Then she had arrived, baffled, at the immense new wall encircling the place, to which small lettered signs in what looked to be a child’s hand were attached at inconsistent intervals.

CLOSED FOR RECONSIDERATION

The cement smelled fresh. There was a smoldering smell, too. Maybe everything back there was getting an air burial. No, that was something different; pyres were not involved. With an air burial something had to come and get you. Something wild. There was no telling what. But you had to be carrion for air burial to be successful. And these objects weren’t even dead. Rather, they had died but weren’t dead now. It was like a church, this museum, a death dome full of fabrication and comfort and instruction and paradox. She hated it. She threw stones over the wall. Was there a vast pit back there then, tarred and lavender, offering final decease at last? She threw more stones. A limousine moved slowly past on the road above her, paused, and then proceeded on.

Stumpp and Pickless, driving with complacent aimlessness in the blueblack limousine, were each chewing on a piece of licorice. The child was in the front, and in the back there was something breathing in a box. A sweetish smell emanated. There was always something heaving in the rear in their rides together, depleted, partial, clinging to life, trying to flutter or crawl, still breathing. Something dumb, bewildered, in a weary-unto-death panic, covered in leather jackets or silken scarves, ringed with spilt dishes of water, pans of seed and crumbs. Emily liked driving purposelessly around with her charges; the motion and the little lights inside that looked like stars served to occupy their thoughts, she believed. She had put away the tea things and was gnawing on the licorice for Stumpp’s sake. Stumpp had introduced her to it, both the red and the black. Licorice was very much an acquired taste, she suspected, pretty much like everything that lay ahead.

“Chucking rocks,” Emily noted. A little thrill rose up in her, then subsided. She maintained a soft spot for irrational behavior. She turned to Stumpp and said somewhat fatuously, “I’m glad I’m not her.” She was shocked she’d said such a thing, though it was neither true nor untrue. Lies, on the other hand, were more permissible, being nothing more than secrets.

“How could you be her?” Stumpp had finished his licorice. There was a last gummy node behind his molar. He left it there for the time being. Funny stuff, licorice. The root of the plant had been found packed in tombs in Egyptian lands. Had meant something once. Reduced to a confection now. The past was replete with lost guides.

“You can become something you’re not,” Emily said. She sensed, then, a whispering, a plunge and settle in the box of spilt offerings. She did not turn her head to confirm that for yet another, the intriguing passage had been breached.

Stumpp maneuvered the long car with incremental turnings of the wheel. Half-pint sutra, little Pickless. Unreaped whirlwind. The sun shone like oil upon the limousine’s hood, which had been waxed to the shine of water. A futuristic ark with two unmateable souls within. As it should be. Into the future. Shouldn’t even have a name, the future. Thing had died back there, whatever it was, whatever labors it had undertaken as a pup. Its time transpired. Knew she’d heard it go, little adept. Best Homo sap can do is perceive the penumbral. Yet not enough the penumbral. Not good enough for Pickless. Nothing too good for Pickless. Grateful he could see that so clearly. Scales all fallen away. For this was a rare confluence. Confluence to end all confluences, Stumpp and Pickless. Would never want materially, he’d make sure of that. All means must be put at her disposal. The rest up to her. For she was going to inherit the world. The world once more …

Was the last breath of a thing relevant? Emily wondered. She couldn’t imagine why it would be.

Now this day was passing, the dreaminess of it. Alice Alive, she thought, running. Alice Endurance, Alice Errant, Alice the Dark. Alice the Alone. Dogs barked in the distance. Unseen traffic whined. The desert became pasture, then park. Permanent toilet facilities. Basketball courts. The former site of the Hohokam Drive-In Theatre, so recently torn down, where Corvus had taken Tommy to see the movies. There one day, gone the next, as ephemeral as the ephemerals it had, in its inception, replaced. Cars and trucks, separated by the now-speakerless pipes, still lined the slotted rows, drawn to this seedless waste as to the old memories of stories not their own. The occupant of each had something used for sale. Infants screamed. People were everywhere relaxing.

At the edge of the park, people milled about holding candles, each with a white, wax-catching skirt. There was a big box of candles. A boy was scooping them up and handing them out, a skinny, shirtless boy in brand-new dungarees, his hair white as glare. He reminded Alice of that boy the three of them had tied up, when there had been three of them. He looked just as eager and dumb, though he didn’t have the same crookedness, and there was the hair of course. Still, he looked a lot like him. Everybody’s got their double, it just wasn’t good to see them. When Corvus had seen Sherwin’s fetch it had certainly not done Sherwin any good. She heard the feign of him saying, “When the two shall be one and the without as the within and the male with the female neither male nor female, that’s when the party begins.”

“Hey there,” the boy said, grinning at her. “You here for the vigil?”

“No,” Alice said.

“First time, huh?”

“What’s it for?”

“Tonight it’s for the aquifer. Lots of people can’t quite grasp the aquifer.”

“Grasp it?”

“Understand how it works.” He was so skinny his ribs showed.

She splayed her hand out before her. “Don’t explain,” she said.

“Last night it was the octopus. Would you have liked that better?”

She would not confess to this.

“Those big eyes, man. And, if they like you, they turn this rosy color. You know what its flesh feels like? Like the inside of your cheek. But things aren’t looking up for the big mollusk. Richly deserving of a vigil, the octopus. Night before that, the Greenland ice sheet. You can’t play favorites.” He was efficiently handing out candles as he spoke. “To continue backwards. Wild horses on BLM land, fetuses, the earth in general, that synagogue from the thirties downtown they want to demolish, fetuses again. We try not to repeat in a month’s time, but fetuses keep coming up. They’re in demand. As a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization, we have no agenda. No long-term goal. We’ve got vigils against stuff, too. Nights against grafted cactus, technological entrancement, alternative fuels, the fur trim on those big ski parkas you see people wearing when it ain’t even cold? That’s German shepherd.”

People were pushing against her, beginning to gather, gazing in earnest at the unlit candles, fingering and crimping the paper skirts. They had pictures of dusty foreign children pinned to their breasts. Pictures of beached whales. Human limbs in ditches. Humans without limbs in ditches.

“Caring doesn’t have to be elitist. True compassion is wordless and hopeless of effecting change. You know what’s nice? When we run out of candles on any given night. Then people come back earlier the next night. They want to be assured of a candle. To be without a candle is not a good thing.”

People were chatting, smiling solemnly. Some had pictures of scenic highways hanging from eyeglass cords around their necks. These were the adopters — having adopted stretches of asphalt, library shelves, eroding beaches, grizzly bears, unique deadly microbes that nevertheless were singular life-forms and should not be exterminated.

“I’ve learned a lot since I started giving out candles. I’m going to start selling them soon, a nickel a pop, but for now they’re free. I used to be so dumb you wouldn’t believe it, but now I’m the Candleman. I’m smart and sane, living on the glow, the displacement in the air the flame makes. I could go anywhere with this routine. The world’s my oyster.”

“What does that mean?” Alice said.

“Another mollusk. Or are you referring to ‘anywhere’? You don’t know what anywhere is? You can live there when you don’t know where else to go. You can make a living anywhere off the caring of others. Feel it! I can feel you feeling it. We’re connected, you and I. I’m looking for a busker babe to work the crowds with, that could be you.”

“You’re kidding,” Alice said, offended. She wasn’t about to be someone who was in a place only because she wasn’t anywhere else.

“You ever live in a pipe, a box, a Dumpster?” the Candleman said. You can be born without an enzyme, a brain, a sense of wonder. You can live like a rat, man, then boom, something better comes along. I’ve seen what comes next. Vigils. Concern is the new consumerism. A person’s worth can be measured by the number and intensity of his concerns. Candles, lighting a candle, confers the kind of fulfillment that only empty ritual can bring. Empty ritual’s important. It’s coming back as a force in people’s lives. Its role is being acknowledged. It’s the keystone for tomorrow’s dealings in an annexed and exploited world. And holding a candle, cradling a little flame with others holding their candle, cradling their little flame gives people the opportunity to experience something bigger than themselves without surrendering themselves to it. A single candle is the symbol of individuated as opposed to universal life. The latter scares people. They don’t want any part of it. It’s spooky, like primordial slime, man, it’s not pretty. Still, a candle alone is nothing. The Candleman knows that. You know that. You’d feel stupid holding it, looking at it. But in the midst of innumerable strangers holding theirs, it works. It’s absolving, it’s reassuring. I’m down to two. Only two left. Take one.”

But they were gone in a twinkling, the first claimed by a man, friend of the Salton Sea, the last by a woman, friend of the symphony.

“Concern for the aquifer isn’t enough tonight,” the Candleman said. “I’ve been detecting a softening around the edges for some time now. Specificity isn’t flying. Running out of candles is no longer going to be the exception but the rule.”

“It seems kind of diluted out here,” Alice said.

“Still ten minutes before shutdown and the lighting, and every bloody candle gone,” the boy marveled.

A well-dressed gentleman in yellow trousers looked unhappily into the empty box. There was a Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose.

“Precancerous?” the Candleman asked solicitously.

Others came, looked into the empty box, departed wordlessly.

“The moment of silence is going to be the new desired thing,” the Candleman said to Alice. “It’s the appropriate response. There’s a pertinence, a satisfaction, in respectfully acknowledging what’s about to become history, whatever can’t cope, can’t adapt or relocate.”

Two people walked past wearing straitjackets, their mouths covered with tape.

“Some, you know, their concerns are obscure, but they’re all participating in a healthy outrage and sorrow. There’s nothing like lighting your little candle when all around you others are lighting theirs. Nothing! Illumination. Extinguishment. Equilibrium. Then everybody goes home.”

“I’m not going to be a part of this,” Alice said.

“Not going to be a part!” He chuckled. “You’ve got to be a part. Don’t you know anything about mathematics? The lost invariants of life can be found only through numbers and their relationships. You have a number, and what you think has happened to you has a number too. It’s all numbers, man, just numbers. God talks in numbers, endless numbers.” He gestured at the crowd. “This is nothing.”

He really reminded her of that boy, that long-ago midsummer boy who had seemed so desperate to explain himself.

“You’ll be a part of it, all right,” the Candleman assured her. “You dream, don’t you?”

Night was approaching in languorous measure. Alice didn’t want to be here for it. And she didn’t believe everything was numbers. Why would God bother to talk in numbers? This boy wasn’t very convincing. She turned away from him without answering, away from the modest spectacle about to occur.

“You got no choice!” he shouted. “You’ll see!” Oh, she thought she didn’t dream, but one morning she was going to wake up, yes, she was, she would wake from the dream even the most reluctant and particular have but once, the one where four animals arrive to carry you off for the moment. You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.