There's Something I Want You to Do

by Charles Baxter

  “You forgave yourself?” I ask. I wish she would change the topic. I wish she wouldn’t dwell on any of this. She doesn’t know I’m capable of murder.

  “No. I lived with it. I saw things. I heard things. I got bloodied with the blood of strangers all over me. People screamed right into my face from pain and confusion. I saw a woman whose boyfriend had forced her mouth open and made her swallow poison. A person shouldn’t see such terribleness. Her stomach had started to burn away before we got to her. When the police questioned the boyfriend, he said that she had told him to go fuck himself and that no woman was going to speak to him that way without consequences. So he did what he did. A manly thing to do. He had her name tattooed on his arm. With a heart! She survived that time, somehow. Two months later he killed her with a knife while she was sleeping. At least he was done away with in prison, later on, stabbed in turn. I think they call that karma. Thank goodness!”

  By now we have made our way to Thirty-Sixth and to the fence surrounding the cemetery, whereupon Corinne loses her train of thought, as she does in all the subsequent walks we take together. When she collects her thoughts, she says, out of nowhere, “I hate them.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Capitalists,” she says, and suddenly I’m not following her. “They’ve made my life miserable. They’ve made me a crazy person. You can talk about the victims of Communism all you want, but as a woman I’m a victim of Capitalism, because did I tell you how they took away my pension? I had a pension, and they gave it to investors and the investors invested the money in bogus real estate and bundled something-or-others, and so I ended up with nothing, bereft, broke, a ruined person, no pension, plus I was crazy and alone, and meanwhile the capitalists were accumulating everything and coming after me in their suits. Have you ever seen how they live? It’s comical.”

  “I agree with you, Corinne,” I tell her, because I do. By now we are inside the cemetery, and we stop, because overhead in the sunlight a bird is singing, a song sparrow. We walk on quietly until we come to my husband, Mike’s resting place.

  Michael Erickson

  1937–1967

  Next to him is the space in the sacred ground where I’ll be casketed in a couple of years. I love this cemetery. I do. I come here often. It’s so quiet here under the balding blue sky with its wisps of white hair, and as we’re looking down at the grass and the leaves, serenaded by the song sparrows, Corinne falls to her knees, smelly as she still is, a human wreck. She mumbles a prayer. “Wesley’s daddy,” my former daughter-in-law cries out, “God bless him, rest in peace, forever and ever and ever.” She’s so vehement, she sounds Irish.

  This is how I know she’ll take care of me once I’m incapacitated. Slowly, on my bad knees, I get down too. How lovely is her madness to me now.

  —

  We get back to the house, and that night the capitalism theme starts up again at the dinner table. We seem to be a household of revolutionaries. This time it comes from Jeremy, who before dinner walks into the kitchen barefoot, holding his iPhone. I am sitting, drinking tea. He’s sixteen or seventeen, I can’t remember which. Usually he and I talk about space aliens, and I pretend they exist to humor him and bring him around eventually to Jesus, but tonight he’s looking at something else. He’s wearing his Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, and I notice that he’s growing a mustache and succeeding with it this time.

  “I can’t fucking believe it,” he says to me. I don’t mind his use of obscenity. Really, I don’t. It tickles me, I can’t say why. “Grandma Dee, do you like elephants?”

  “I like them very much,” I say. “Though I’ve never known any one of them personally.” We’re seated at the kitchen table. Astrid is making dinner, Wesley is in the garage doing something-or-other, and Corinne is upstairs cooing in front of the TV set. I don’t know where Lucy is—reading somewhere in the house, I expect. “They are among the greatest of God’s creatures,” I say. “I understand that they mourn their dead.”

  “So look at this fucking thing,” he says, pointing at the little phone screen.

  “It’s too small. I can’t see it.”

  “Want me to read it?” he asks. What a handsome young man he is. I enjoy his company. It’s so easy to love a grandchild, there’s no effort to it at all. Besides, his face reminds me of my late husband’s face just a little.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Well, see the thing is, it’s about elephants being killed and like that.”

  “What about them?” Astrid asks, from over by the stove. “Killed how?”

  “Okay, so in Zimbabwe, which I know where it is because we’ve studied it in geography, anyway what this says, this article, is, they’ve been, these people, these Zimbabweans, putting cyanide into the water holes in this, like, huge park, to kill the elephants. And these fuckers have access, I guess, to industrial cyanide that they use in gold mining—”

  “Jeremy, please watch your language,” Astrid says demurely. She’s dicing tomatoes now.

  “And they’ve been, I mean the poisoned water hole has been, like, killing the little animals, the cheetahs, and then the vultures, that eat the cheetahs once they’re dead, so it’s, like, this total outdoor death palace eatery, but mostly the cyanide in the water holes has been killing the elephants.” He gazes at me as if I’m to blame. I’m old. I understand: old people are responsible for everything. “Which are harmless?”

  “Why’ve they been doing that?” I ask.

  “Killing elephants? For the ivory. They have, like, tusks.”

  “How many elephants,” I ask, “did they do this to?”

  “It says here eighty,” Jeremy tells me. “Eighty dead elephants poisoned by cyanide lying in dead elephant–piles. Jesus, I hate people sometimes.”

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s fair.”

  “What do you suppose they do with all that ivory?” Astrid asks, stirring a sauce.

  “For carvings,” I say. “They carve little Buddhas. They kill the elephants and carve the happy Buddha. Then they sell the happy Buddha to Americans. The little ivory Buddha goes in the lighted display case.”

  “That is so wrong,” Jeremy says. “People are fucking sick. These elephants are more human, for fuck’s sake, than the humans.”

  “It’s the avarice,” I say.

  “It’s the what?” he asks.

  “Another word for greed. Go ask Corinne,” I tell him. “She’s upstairs, watching TV. She doesn’t like it, either. She sounds like you.”

  “I still hate her,” he says. “I can’t talk to her yet. It’s my policy. She just wasn’t—”

  “I know, I know,” I say. “The policy is understandable. You’ll just have to give it up eventually, sweetie.”

  “You can’t tell me that it’s no biggie because it was a biggie. If that wasn’t a biggie, leaving my dad and you to take care of me, then nothing is big, you know?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I understand. For now.”

  “Jeremy,” Astrid pipes up from the stove, “where’s your father?”

  “Him? He’s out in the garage. He’s working on the truck or something. I heard him drop his wrench and swear a minute ago. There are too many of them in the house. That’s what he said before he went out there. He’s been saying it.”

  “Too many what?” Astrid asks.

  “Women,” I say, because I know Wesley and how he thinks. “We confuse him.”

  —

  I can see it all, and I know exactly what will happen. I have second-sight, which I got from my own father, who foresaw his death. He saw an albino deer cross the road in front of his car while he was on vacation, and he turned to my mother and said, “Something will happen to me,” and something did. A stroke took him a week later, and no one was surprised.

  They’ll do surgery on me and give me the usual chemo and radiation. I’ll be okay for a while, but then it will come back in other locations in my body. I won’t have too much time then. The point is not to be morbid but to meet the
end of life with celebration. This is what I want to say: the thought of dying is a liberation for me. It frees us from the accumulations.

  This is where Corinne comes in. I have it all planned out. I will say to her, “There’s something I want you to do. I want you to accompany me on this journey as far as you can. You can’t go all the way, but you can keep me company part of the way.” She’ll agree to this. As long as I can walk, Corinne will take me around to the parks and the lakes. We’ll go to the Lake Harriet rose garden, and together we’ll identify those roses—floribunda! hybrid tea!—and then we’ll stroll into the Roberts Bird Sanctuary nearby. I know most of the birds over there: there’s a nest of great horned owls, with a couple of owlets growing up and eating whatever the mama owl brings to them, including, I once saw, a crow. I’ve seen warblers and egrets and herons, very dignified creatures, though comical. We’ll see the standard-issue birds, the robins, chickadees, blue jays, and cardinals, birds of that ilk.

  She’ll take me over to the Lake Harriet Band Shell, where on warm summer nights the Lake Harriet Orchestra (there is one) will play show tunes, and I’ll sit there in my wheelchair tapping along with “On the Street Where You Live.”

  We’ll go down to the Mississippi, and we’ll walk, or I’ll be wheeled, along the pathways near the falls where the mills once were. I’ll hear the guides saying that Minneapolis has a thriving industry in prosthetic medicine because so many industrial accidents occurred here years ago thanks to the machinery built for grinding, lost arms and so on, chewed up in the manufacturing process.

  We’ll be out on the Stone Arch Bridge, and Corinne will be absented in her usual way, ideas batting around her head, all the bowling pins up there scattered and in a mess. “I just don’t have any filters,” she’ll say. “Any thought seems to be welcome in my brain at any time, day or night.”

  “Yes,” I’ll agree. I’ll see the Pillsbury A Mill from here. What a comfort these old structures will be to us, still standing, their bright gray brick almost indestructible. Spray from the Falls of St. Anthony, named by Father Hennepin himself, will lightly touch my face, and I’ll feel a sudden stab of pain in my body, but it won’t matter anymore. Pain is the price of admission to the next world. Here will come a boy on a skateboard talking on his cell phone, and behind him, his girlfriend, also on a skateboard (pink, this time), texting as she goes. They’ll look just born, those two, out of the eggshell yesterday.

  “Jeremy has one of those,” Corinne will say, meaning the skateboard.

  “He’s quite the expert.”

  A fat man in flip-flops will pass by us. He’ll be carrying several helium balloons, though I don’t think they’ll be for sale. On the other side of the bridge in Father Hennepin park, we’ll rest under a maple tree. A single leaf will fall into my lap.

  Here. I place it before you.

  Glory, gloriousness. During my life, I never had the time to look closely at anything except Wes, when he was a baby, and my husband’s headstone after he was gone. Now I’ll have all the time in the world. Nothing will bore me now. My obliviousness will sink into my past history. Henceforth my patience will be endless, thanks to the brevity of time. Stillness will steal over me as I study the world within. When I look down into my lap, I’ll see in this delicate object the three major parts, with their branching veins, and the ten points of the leaf, and the particular bright red-rust-gold color, but it’s the veins I’ll return to, so like our own, our capillaries. I’ll finger the maple leaf tenderly and wonder why we find it beautiful and will answer the question by saying that it’s God-given.

  “There’s that nice Dr. Jones, way over there,” Corinne will say. “Lucy’s doctor, out on a stroll.” She’ll pause, then say, “He could lose some weight.”

  “They’re doing a Katharine Hepburn revival at the St. Anthony Main movie theater,” I’ll say, gazing at the marquee listing Bringing Up Baby.

  “I always found her rather virile,” Corinne will reply.

  Thus will our days pass. You need a companion for what I’m about to do, and she’ll be mine. Once I’m in bed, and then in the hospice, she’ll read to me: Pride and Prejudice, my favorite book after the Bible, and she’ll read from the Bible too, in her haphazard way, wandering from verse to verse. I wonder if she’ll read from the Book of Esther, which never mentions God. Slowly I’ll depart from this Earth, medicated on morphine as I will be, mulling and stirring the fog descending over me, over Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, over daytime and its dark twin, night, while in the background someone will be playing Mozart on a radio. What is that piece? I think I’ll know it. Eine kleine Nachtmusik, is it…? Then I’ll know more pain, and darkness. And then the light won’t go on ever again, here.

  —

  On the other side I’ll float for a while, between worlds. The pain will be gone, the pleasure, too, those categories neutralized. On all sides the boundary markers will have softened. Instead of coming from a single source, sound—music—will come from everywhere, and I’ll hear it with more than my ears. I’ll see with more than my eyes. Faces, I think, will pass me in corridors that are not corridors. The old vocabularies will be useless. They will name nothing anymore. This is the afterlife: we will be headed everywhere and nowhere, and we will drink in light, swallow it, swim in it. We’ll hear laughter. And then—but “then” has no meaning—my dear Michael will find me, without his former shape but still recognizable, and he’ll take my hand and lead me toward two rooms, and he’ll say to me, “Oh, my dearest, my life, there is only one question, but you must answer it.” And I’ll ask him, “What is that question? Tell me. Because I love you…” I’ll want to answer it correctly. What has this to do with the two rooms? But for that moment, after he puts his finger to his lips, he dissolves into air, he becomes pollen, and is scattered.

  Somehow I am led into the first room. I’ll be in a chamber of perpetual twilight. No one predicted this twilight, or the shabbiness, the feeling of a beggar. How richly plain this all is! Something wants something from me here. My attention. My love.

  Now I’ll enter the second room. And all at once I’ll be dazzled: because here on the richest of thrones, gold beyond gold, sits this beautiful man, the most beautiful man I have ever seen, smiling at me with an expression of infinite compassion. His hair will be curling into tendrils of vibrating color. He will be holding up his palm, facing toward me, and in that hand I will see the world, the solar system, and the universe, rotating slowly. Behind him somehow are the animals, the great trees, everything.

  It will be a test, the last one I will ever have. Which room do I choose?

  The beautiful man clothed in light will ask me, “Do you admire me? Care for me?”

  And I will say, “No, because you are Lucifer.” And I will return to the room where it is always twilight, where all that is asked of me is love.

  Gluttony

  Immediately after the accident, the doctor thought: Stupid pain. Stupidity itself. Below the knee, thanks to a fractured tibia, pain sent its dull, insistent neurological message upstairs. Pleasure never works that way. Pleasure’s vague fog spreads underneath the skin in a warm narcotic glow—a fog that lights up the soul. Then it fades. You try to locate its source, and when you do, you crave more of it. The bottle. The drug. The woman. The meal. Especially the meal.

  —

  He found himself in the car eating beef jerky and the contents of a jumbo bag of potato chips. He didn’t remember buying either one, but he must have purchased them when he stopped at the gas station. There, under the buzzing fluorescent lights, everyone had the doughy complexion of figures in a Hopper painting. Now, lying voluptuously on the front seat next to him, the bag of potato chips had been slit open in a kind of physical invitation into which he inserted his hand and withdrew food. Who had opened these packages? Someone had. He had, the doctor, Elijah. Who else? He didn’t remember opening them; they had commanded him to make the first move, like the cake in Alice in Wonderland with the note attached: “
Eat me.” The food carried some responsibility for his excesses. It had desires, especially the desire to be consumed.

  As he chewed and swallowed, he piloted the little car homeward through the dark. The steering wheel, however, was greasy with salt and cooking oils and saturated fats transferred from his palm, and although he wiped his fingers on his trouser leg, he couldn’t get the grease off his skin. He felt drowsy. A literate man who entertained himself by reading Shakespeare, the doctor thought of Lady Macbeth: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” No, not these hands.

  Against his own obesity, he had concocted his own diet plan, the Jones Plan. It was simplicity itself: every time you go into a restaurant, you order an entrée you do not want to eat. You don’t like the taste of pork? You order pork. If the very sight of lobster disgusts you, you order lobster. You search the menu for an unpalatable culinary miscalculation, and then you request it. You ask your wife to prepare distasteful meals. The whole point is to be presented, day after day, with the unwanted. Naturally your wife is horrified and insulted by these ideas, when she does not regard them as comical. So far, however, no weight has been lost by anyone, thanks to the plan.

  He pulled up into the driveway and wiped his hands again but this time on the car’s dashboard. The lights were blazing inside the house, so Susan would still be up, vigilant about his arrival. When he stepped out of the car, he stood for a moment underneath the linden in the front yard and thoughtfully noted its seeds scattered on the lawn, pale green against the darker green of the grass illuminated by the streetlight. He felt a pain in his chest, and its attendant breathlessness. Ah, he thought, it’s that again.

  Inside the house, dressed in her blue bathrobe, Susan put down her book, a history of the Armory Show, and rose to greet him. Her perfume preceded her. She kissed him, her eyes still on the door through which he had entered, a kiss both perfunctory and ironic, gestural in its well-meaning sweetness. “Your lips taste of salt,” she said.