by Anne Rice
“I’m scared to take the test, son. I’m scared to stick another needle in me and I’m scared not to because if I didn’t then I know I’m going to be scared by everything around me, the whole world.”
She’s all crying and the oven timer goes dingdingding, so I took the enchiladas out. Then I put my arm around Mom’s waist and let her cry for the longest time, and dinner was totally cold when we finally got around to it; but it’s the thought that counts and it was like the first dinner she’d made in six months.
After we ate I asked her what Grandpa was like. “Was he ever mean to you?” I said. “Did he like hit you and stuff?”
“No. I got everything I ever asked for. It was Will he hated. He always said Will was stubborn. He’d lock him up in the toolshed for days at a time. Me, though, he loved me. He loved me to death. His love was a scary thing. It engulfed me. It ate me up. I guess that’s why I became a junkie.”
And then I understood everything. Uncle Will’s sickness didn’t just come from nowhere. It had been handed down through the generations and maybe, one day, it would even come down to me. Grown-ups are always all, what a big deal it is to grow up, to become mature, to set aside childish things as my grandma says, quoting the Bible … I ain’t grown up yet but I already know that growing up is a big old joke … you don’t grow up. You just live through your childhood again and again and again until the day you die. Your childhood is who you are.
“I’m going back down to Uncle Will’s place,” I said. “There’s something I just got to tell him.”
“All right,” she said. “But don’t go outside. The curfew hasn’t been lifted yet and you don’t know what the cops will do, they’re in such a state over these damn riots.”
Yeah. We could hear sirens in the distance. Mom switched channels and an anchorman was talking about the fires again … behind him, the city was burning … in a little window on the screen, they were replaying the video of the Rodney King beating for the millionth time. They had preempted the fucking Simpsons. They showed a clip of Pat Buchanan visiting South Central. He might just as well have been an alien from Close Encounters.
I went down to Uncle Will’s to tell him my big new insight. I figure if he would have known that he was just slow-motion-replaying a scene from his childhood over and over, he could maybe step back from it, get it in perspective, and then maybe we could pull Ferdie back from his so-called death and Will out of his madness. But when I got to Will’s I could tell that things had gone wrong, more wrong than they ever were before.
Will and Ferdie were standing on opposite sides of the living room. Between them, on the big TV, was the bird’s-eye view of the ocean of fire. Will was shouting into his portable phone. “God damn it,” he was saying, “I need the fucking pills now. He’s getting stubborn again, and I’m gonna fucking lose control!”
He had run out of datura. But what difference did it make? Ferdie was standing there and he was all submissive, all smiling, didn’t seem like he was doing nothing wrong.
I heard Mr. Death’s voice, “You know I can’t come out there now. The curfew. And my supplier he way out in South Pas.”
And Uncle Will’s all, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m fucking desperate!”
He slammed the portable phone against the wall. Then he turned and saw me. “Kid’s being stubborn again,” he shouted. “He won’t mind, he just stands there, won’t do what he’s told.” Then he turned to Ferdie and screamed, “I want you to whine, you hear! I want you to wipe that grin off your face! I’m sick of watching that smile day in day out!”
Ferdie tried to frown but the smile was soldered on his face. He said, “But I can’t be unhappy, Dad. I have the kindest father in the world. I have a great life.”
“You don’t even have a life, you’re just an animated corpse, and I want you to obey me!”
Ferdie’s all, “Okay, Dad. I’m as sad as you want me to be.” And he goes on smiling. And Uncle Will’s going berserk. I mean like, more berserk than he’s ever been before, he’s like frothing at the mouth and shit. And Ferdie just goes on smiling. And Will’s all, “I’m gonna hurt you, Ferdie,” but Ferdie’s all, “I don’t hurt anymore, Dad. There ain’t no hurting where I am, the dead country.” And he goes on smiling.
Uncle Will picks up the first thing he sees, which is one of the empty bottles lined up against the wall. He strides over to Ferdie and he starts swinging it and it cracks against the wall and he cuts Ferdie’s face a couple of times, and Ferdie goes on smiling. Will socks him in the jaw and a bloody tooth flies on to the carpet, and Ferdie smiles a gap-toothed smile, wider than ever. Will’s weeping with rage and he just goes on punching and punching and for a long while I’m all standing there and staring because I can’t believe it’s happening, it’s worse than I’ve ever seen before. I forget all about the big old revelation I was going to make. I think maybe even though it’s true, that we’re all together in this generational cycle of violence, that just saying it isn’t going to make it stop because we’re stuck in it, we’re part of it; we’re the spokes of the wheel and when the wheel turns we can’t just turn the other way. I’m so full of despair I want to go hang myself like Ferdie was trying to. I want to be dead.
While I’m all standing there with these terrible emotions raging through me, Uncle Will’s never stopped trying to whip that smile off Ferdie’s face. And now he’s all, “You ain’t dead, you ain’t dead, it’s just your stubbornness speaking, and I’m going to shock you back to the way you are. You can’t escape from me by playing possum cuz I know you’re inside there and you’re laughing at me, laughing at me …” and he sounds just like Grandpa used to sound sometimes. I stand there and watch while he ties Ferdie to a chair with an extension cord and now he’s all getting more cords out of a drawer and I realize that when Uncle Will says shock that’s exactly what he means; he’s going to fry Ferdie’s brains and this time he’ll really be dead. And finally this shocks me out of my despair and I do what I should have done the first day I saw my cousin cut and bruised and caged … I crawl over to where the phone’s lying on the carpet and I pull up the antenna and I dial 911.
It takes forever to get through because of the riots I guess. And the whole time Uncle Will’s all storming through the house and throwing things around, and there’s blood all over Ferdie’s white shirt but Ferdie’s all smiling, smiling, smiling, and even I can feel a piece of Uncle Will’s madness in me, the smile that goes on and on and driving you all crazy and shit. Then there’s a lull in the shouting. Uncle Will’s out of breath or something maybe, and that’s when I get through to the police and I give them our address and tell them there’s a child beating going on right now and please come, please Jesus come fast or I think my cousin’s going to get fucking killed.
I put down the phone and I see the two of them, face-to-face, frozen in a moment of concentrated rage. Uncle Will turns to me and says, real soft like, “Traitor.”
I’m all, “I’m sorry, Uncle Will.” And I’m thinking of the times Uncle Will’s been good to me, put his arm around me, wiped my tears with his sleeve, and all the time there’s been a mirror image of this love between us, locked up like a dirty secret. And I’m all crying. We can hear sirens in the distance. They’re already coming.
“I’ve gotta get out of here,” says Will. “Can’t let them catch me. There’s a warrant on me, parking tickets and shit, car registration, I don’t know.”
“You got nowheres to go, Uncle Will. There’s a curfew.”
Someone is knocking on the door.
Uncle Will bolts past both of us toward Ferdie’s room. I let the officer in and she takes one look at Ferdie, tied to the chair and covered in blood, and she’s all pulling out her gun and running toward the back of the house.
I untie Ferdie and then me and him follow. We hear the rustle of the orange tree and we know he’s going down into the alley. The sirens are wailing from every side now. The police officer’s all, “Stay right here, kids. I’m going down to ra
dio for help.”
So there’s me and there’s Ferdie standing on the balcony looking down through the branches of the orange tree into the alley below. And there’s Uncle Will. Staggering. Confused. Two police officers come in from Aztec and two from Astoria, and they have their PR24’s out. They don’t read him no rights, they don’t call out to him to surrender. They just surround him and start beating the shit out of him with their power strokes. The whistling of the nightsticks and the crunching of bones blend in with the other sounds of the night, the swaying of the orange branches, the rattling of garbage cans, the thrum of helicopters, the wail of sirens and stray cats. The night air totally smells of citrus and smog and garbage and gunsmoke. Though this is all happening for real and not on television, there’s something about it that’s less real than television: it’s because we’re standing in the warm wind of night and seeing the San Gabriel Mountains through the veil of smog and we feel small and we feel powerless, not like TV where you’re bigger than the people on the screen and you can turn them on and off with a flick of a remote. I look down and I don’t see a man I used to love, I only see flesh and bone and blood, and I try to feel but I don’t feel nothing, nothing.
And like, now I understand why Ferdie prefers being dead.
The beating goes on and on, and afterwards Uncle Will isn’t moving no more and I’m sure that he’s not gonna see the morning.
And I’m all, “Ferdie, come back from the dead now. You don’t have to be dead no more. We’ve killed him.”
But Ferdie doesn’t come back from the dead. I look into his eyes and they have the lifeless look of a camcorder lens. There won’t be no videotape of Uncle Will to play on national television. No, there’ll just be the videotape that’s burned into me and Ferdie, with the erase tab popped forever.
Ferdie smiles. And smiles.
And smiles.
Me and my mom and Ferdie are in family counseling now. We were on a waiting list for a foster home for a while, but nobody wanted us. Mr. Death has disappeared, and we’ve never been able to find his house again.
Our counselor says it’s true what Mr. Death said: that there’s no magic to what happened, that Ferdie never was dead or came back from the dead. He says that Uncle Will wove a tapestry of illusion around us, that we were trapped inside his warped reality. He says that coming to terms with this will help us to change, to heal.
Well like, I’ve changed. I hardly drink no more and I never shoplift. I try to read books sometimes, like Ferdie used to. Ferdie don’t read books. I don’t think he’s even growing any. He’s all frozen in time.
But Ferdie hasn’t stopped smiling. He smiles through everything: happy times, sad times. A defense mechanism, the counselor calls it. My mom says, “Give him time and one day he’ll feel again.”
Sometimes I ask him if he’s ever going to come back. And always he’s all, “Nu-uh.”
“Why not, Ferdie?” I’ll ask him. Because like, there’s no reason for him to play dead no more. Mom’s in rehab and we’re getting taken care of, and he don’t have to feel pain all the time like he used to.
But he’ll just look at me with them dead eyes, and he’ll say, “I like it better here.”
THE DOCTOR
ANNE RICE
THE doctor had never been inside an antebellum mansion until that spring in New Orleans. And the old house really did have white fluted columns on the front, though the paint was peeling away. Greek Revival style they called it—a long violet-gray town house on a dark shady corner in the Garden District, its front gate guarded it seemed by two enormous oaks. The iron lace railings were made in a rose pattern and much festooned with vines—purple wisteria, the yellow Virginia creeper, and bougainvillea of a dark, incandescent pink.
He liked to pause on the marble steps and look up at the Doric capitals, wreathed as they were by those drowsy fragrant blossoms. The sun came in thin dusty shafts through the twisting branches. Bees sang in the tangle of brilliant green leaves beneath the peeling cornices. Never mind that it was so somber here, so damp.
Even the approach through the deserted streets seduced him. He walked slowly over cracked and uneven sidewalks of herringbone brick or gray flagstone, under an unbroken archway of oak branches, the light eternally dappled, the sky perpetually veiled in green. Always he paused at the largest tree that had lifted the iron fence with its bulbous roots. He could not have gotten his arms around the trunk of it. It reached all the way from the pavement to the house itself, twisted limbs clawing at the shuttered windows beyond the banisters, leaves enmeshed with the flowering vines.
But the decay here troubled him nevertheless. Spiders wove their tiny intricate webs over the iron lace roses. In places the iron had so rusted that it fell away to powder at the touch. And here and there near the railings, the wood of the porches was rotted right through.
Then there was the old swimming pool far beyond the garden—a great long octagon bounded by the flagstones, which had become a swamp unto itself with its black water and wild irises. The smell alone was frightful. Frogs lived there, frogs you could hear at dusk, singing their grinding, ugly song. Sad to see the little fountain jets up one side and down the other still sending their little arching streams into the muck. He longed to drain it, clean it, scrub the sides with his own hands if he had to. Longed to patch the broken balustrade, and rip the weeds from the overgrown urns.
Even the elderly aunts of his patient—Miss Carl, Miss Millie, and Miss Nancy—had an air of staleness and decay. It wasn’t a matter of gray hair or wire-rimmed glasses. It was their manner, and the fragrance of camphor that clung to their clothes.
Once he had wandered into the library and taken a book down from the shelf. Tiny black beetles scurried out of the crevice. Alarmed, he had put the book back.
If there had been air-conditioning in the place it might have been different. But the old house was too big for that—or so they had said back then. The ceilings soared fourteen feet overhead. And the sluggish breeze carried with it the scent of mold.
His patient was well cared for, however. That he had to admit. A sweet old black nurse named Viola brought his patient out on the screened porch in the morning and took her in at evening.
“She’s no trouble at all, Doctor. Now, you come on, Miss Deirdre, walk for the doctor.” Viola would lift her out of the chair and push her patiently step by step.
“I’ve been with her seven years now, Doctor, she’s my sweet girl.”
Seven years like that. No wonder the woman’s feet had started to turn in at the ankles, and her arms to draw close to her chest if the nurse didn’t force them down into her lap again.
Viola would walk her round and round the long double parlor, past the harp and the Bösendorfer grand layered with dust. Into the long broad dining room with its faded murals of moss-hung oaks and tilled fields.
Slippered feet shuffling on the worn Aubusson carpet. The woman was forty-one years old, yet she looked both ancient and young—a stooped and pale child, untouched by adult worry or passion. Deirdre, did you ever have a lover? Did you ever dance in that parlor?
On the library bookshelves were leather-bound ledgers with old dates marked on the spines in faded purple ink: 1756, 1757, 1758 … Each bore the family name of Mayfair in gold lettering.
Ah, these old southern families, how he envied them their heritage. It did not have to lead to this decay. And to think, he did not know the full names of his own great-grandparents or where they had been born.
Mayfair—a vintage colonial clan. There were old paintings on the walls of men and women in eighteenth-century dress, as well as daguerreotypes and tintypes and faded photographs. A yellowed map of Saint-Domingue—did they call it that still?—in a dirty frame in the hallway. And a darkening painting of a great plantation house.
And look at the jewels his patient wore. Heirlooms surely, with those antique settings. What did it mean that they put that kind of jewelry on a woman who hadn’t spoken a word or moved of her own
volition in over seven years?
The nurse said she never took off the chain with the emerald pendant, not even when she bathed Miss Deirdre.
“Let me tell you a little secret, Doctor, don’t you ever touch that!”
“And why not” he wanted to ask. But he had said nothing. He watched uneasily as the nurse put on the patient’s ruby earrings, her diamond ring.
Like dressing a corpse, he thought. And out there the dark oaks wind their limbs toward the dusty window screens. And the garden shimmers in the dull heat.
“And look at her hair,” said the nurse lovingly. “Have you ever seen such beautiful hair?”
It was black all right, and thick and curly and long. The nurse loved to brush it, watching the curls roll up as the brush released them. And the patient’s eyes, for all their listless stare, were a clear blue. Yet now and then a thin silver line of saliva fell down from the side of her mouth, making a dark circle on the bosom of her white nightgown.
“It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t tried to steal those things,” he said half to himself. “She’s so helpless.”
The nurse had given him a superior, knowing smile.
“No one who’s ever worked in this house would try that.”
“But she sits all alone on that side porch by the hour. You can see her from the street.”
Laughter.
“Don’t worry about that, doctor. No one around here is fool enough to come in that gate. Old Ronnie mows the lawn, but that’s because he always did, done it for thirty years now, but then old Ronnie isn’t exactly right in the head.”
“Nevertheless …” But he had stopped himself. What was he doing, talking like this right in front of the silent woman, whose eyes only now and then moved just a little, whose hands lay just where the nurse had placed them, whose feet rested limply on the bare floor. How easy it was to forget oneself, forget to respect this tragic creature. Nobody knew what the woman understood.
“Might get her out in the sun sometime,” the doctor said. “Her skin is so white.”