by Joy Williams
My mother’s eager beauty faded, her reckless teasing ways. She became more and more convinced that I had died that night and had witnessed ruthless and troubling mysteries which it was essential for me to recall. I had experienced a great reversal and my life, or whatever it was that had been restored to me, must be subject to the most delicate and definitive interpretation. The fact that I was an awkward yet trusting and thoughtful child with few apparent gifts made my presence all the more properly intriguing in my mother’s eyes. For were there not many stories of servants or otherwise utterly uncharismatic and unassuming persons turning out to be the enlightened ones who could lead others out of their lifeless lives and into a new contract with the world?
During my childhood my mother took me to many doctors, all of whom maintained I was perfectly healthy. She was told again and again that she had been mistaken, that if I had stopped breathing for as long as she claimed, any number of neurological issues would have arisen. And they had not. In a crisis of fright, time had played a trick on her, a new and inexperienced mother. Most likely I had never stopped breathing at all.
Yet, my mother was convinced that I had been somewhere, in some frightful chaos of non-being that nevertheless contained an observable yet incomprehensible future to which we would all be subjected.
My father moved out, into a suite of rooms above the boatyard offices. My mother and I continued to live in the seaside house which she neglected. She no longer went to the club or saw her friends, who felt they’d endured quite enough of us and the rumors of that night.
I continued to be subjected to medical examinations and psychological testing. One specialist was interested in me for a time because he believed that only genetic mutations could rewire the brain to cope with the environmental and moral challenges of a ruined, overpopulated world. But he found nothing. He had never found anything. He admitted it was just a sensible, attractive theory.
I remember the results of my last test, the last because my mother no longer had the money to continue. She could not pay—the secular bastards, she called them—and they never contacted us again. She came to believe that our every thought and emotion was being graphed by a newly sinister camarilla. The only way she could save me from this situation was if she severed herself from me. But this belief came later. Until then, I had a ragged succession of tutors and my mother watched me anxiously, fearful that the error of my return would be corrected.
There were several instances when death could have escorted me once more into the robing room from which I doubted it would have allowed me to emerge again. The one I recall most vividly occurred at the hardware store where my mother had taken me to select a new color for the walls of my bedroom which were still covered with the insipid pink of my infancy. I chose a color called Passing Cloud, and a can of paint mixed by computer to the specifications of that hue spun out of the unsecured door of the machine that was mixing it and soared across the room. Clutching a fistful of paint cards, I could have been brained but was not.
The can of paint, Passing Cloud, a color eventually not chosen for the walls of my room, rolled through the store back to screen repair and slammed into a cardboard box where a pelican awaited pickup by the Bird Lady. There was no sound from the box. The pelican had been found, far north of its normal range, wandering disoriented in the parking lot. Everyone in town had heard about the Bird Lady but we children didn’t get taken out to see her much. People applauded her efforts but they found her ten damp acres rescued through donations from becoming another sewer meadow just not that educational. How many times must the children be informed as to how clean the vultures keep their cages, they asked? And the volunteers are so gloomy and the desperate need for lumber and wire, seed, fish and towels never ends…I went there once, I cannot remember the circumstances. I found myself in an area where visitors were not supposed to go and there I saw an old oil drum, brimming with amputated wings. I did not speak of this to my mother.
My mother and I became reclusive, increasingly so after an incident which pained both of us to recall. Her former best friend, Slim, had lost her child, a boy of nine. Slim had had difficulty conceiving but then she did and the boy was extremely bright and quite frail. But then there was something about him breaking his arm, they’d never found out how exactly, and then getting a staph infection in the very wing of the hospital her family had founded, the very hospital in which my father would later lie.
My mother had been attempting to acquaint herself with Buddhism in her continuing quest for guidance in this life. Unfortunately, her first and possibly last attempt to incorporate Zen’s playful koans in her interaction with others was with bereaved Slim one bright and windy morning on the beach. It was not even noon but poor Slim was well toasted, her skin and hair reeking of whiskey, her coat incorrectly buttoned. She tearfully recounted the death of her little boy and the travails of her family, everyone hating and blaming everyone now, it was a nightmare, day after day. God knows what possessed my mother to relate one of those annoying Zen stories in an attempt to console her.
“One day, a flock of wild geese was seen flying and the master asked, ‘What are they?’ ” my mother said, gesturing at the empty sky.
“Say?” Slim said.
“ ‘They are wild geese,’ the novitiate answered.”
“What novitiate?” Slim cried.
“ ‘Whither are they flying?’ ” my mother continued serenely.
“What the fuck, Martha.”
“ ‘They have flown away,’ the little monk said.”
“What little monk!” Slim’s face had become even more flushed.
“And the master, the wise man, said, ‘You say they have flown away but all the same they have been here from the very beginning.’ ”
My mother later admitted that the story was not as engaging as she remembered, but she was nonetheless startled by her friend’s reaction.
“You are such a cold cunt, Martha!” Slim said. “All that while you were going on about your child’s dying and coming back, boring everyone into a stupor, though we were all so supportive, we carried you for so long listening to your crap and it hadn’t even happened and here’s my little boy gone forever and you can’t even bother to say anything decent. Fuck your little monks and geese, Martha. Fuck you.”
And she had stumbled down the beach in a rage, trailing clouds of whiskey fumes.
After that we seldom left the house. My mother had stopped drinking alcohol completely though she drank a great deal of tea. A strong blend called Russian Caravan was her favorite. I seldom saw my father. Sometimes he would take me sailing, which seemed to make him more melancholy than ever. The sea was sullen and uncertain, some of the little coves he remembered so fondly were now reeking and silted. He still took some pleasure in his proficiency with the huge red sails, the ropes and pulleys, but the simple fragrance and freedom of his world had been lost to him, and so they were to me who had barely known them.
As for my mother, she was so convinced that I had died it was difficult for her to experience me as a living child. We spent long days in silence. Other times, days would pass with my mother speaking volubly about the diminishing fortunes of the world, the dystopian days ahead. Soon it will all be taken out of our hands, she said. What was it like there, she asked, the dead world? I tried to honor her queries for I loved her. She was my mother. It felt like the hour before daybreak, I told her, and she agreed that it would be like that. There were long figures above me, I told her another time. Were they like homes, she asked me, long homes? I think she must have read that somewhere, perhaps in one holy book or another. I tried to reassure my mother; I was polite and helpful, like a good guest. I probably should not have misled her.
“You’re evolving,” my mother said. “You don’t want to just adapt, like me.”
I did not feel as though I were evolving. My tutors found me simpleminded.
The last one particularly found me exasperating.
“Do you have any idea why you’re here?”
“I have to be here. Mother had a tutor and she…”
“No, here, on this earth.” He raised his hands and cupped them as if he were holding something. He had the hands of an inept carpenter, the nails blackened and ridged.
“I don’t have to answer that today,” I said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with spelling.”
“Fine,” he said. “If you just want to memorize definitions and crap that’s fine with me, I’ll still get paid. What is a homograph?”
“A word with the same spelling as another but with a different meaning.” I liked homographs.
“How do you spell commensurable?”
Did he suspect I had forgotten how to spell it? I had not.
“How about perspiration?”
It was a word I liked very much.
“Virus.”
“…”
“And what is a virus?”
“A virus isn’t strictly alive but it isn’t dead either. It’s a life form.”
“You are here on this earth to prepare a report on it,” he said irritably. “What will be the nature of your report?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’ve assisted other children,” the tutor said. “I didn’t come out of nowhere. But you must help me help you. Does the sun go around the earth or does the earth revolve around the sun?”
“The earth revolves around the sun.”
“Why did people believe it was otherwise for so long?”
“Because it looks as though the sun is going around the earth.”
“What is consciousness?”
“Consciousness is a dissociation of the I from the world of the not-I. It is a separation, a rift. No,” I said. “That’s not right.”
“Your answer is adequate,” he said impatiently.
“Why was the largest tree in our community cut down?”
He was being cruel bringing up the tree again. It always brought me close to tears. “Because it was in the middle of where they wanted to put the rotary,” I said.
“No,” he said. “It was because people suspected it felt it was going to live forever. What is God?”
“God is a way of thinking,” I said meekly.
“We all lead three lives, the true one, the false one and what is the third?”
I said nothing.
“What is the third?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m going to use the courtesy of the house,” the tutor said, “and then I will return with your mother.”
After a while the toilet flushed. Then he came back into the room with my mother. He was saying: “Most instructors wouldn’t even take her on, you know. It’s unlikely she’ll ever be polished enough to address the real questions, the important ones. I am asking nothing of her but little baby steps.” He looked at me. “Again, what is the third life?”
“Be imaginative, Khristen,” my mother said. “Just guess.”
“I don’t want to guess.”
“It’s a riddle. Make something up.”
“It’s not a riddle.”
“Well perhaps not. But listen. We all lead three lives. The true one, the false one, and the one we are not aware of. See how easy that was?”
* * *
—
At last the moment came when I was to be sent away to a real school, a boarding school in the West where my situation would be appreciated and the alarming gift I had been given properly acknowledged.
My mother told me that I was old enough to make the trip alone as there wasn’t money for an additional fare.
In the beginning the only other passengers on the train were sociologists. They ignored me. There was nothing about me to inspire their interest. Still, their disappointment with one another was obvious. Each had hoped to encounter an artist, a poetic and drunken prelate, perhaps, a botanist, even a professional athlete or doomsday commentator. This is what the great trains of literature were supposed to provide. But all were sociologists, social workers, social engineers, sociobiologists.
“How did there get to be so many of us?” one of them said.
One of them commented on some peculiar ash-colored creatures in the distance, milling about in smoky disorder. “Look,” he said, “beasts at play.”
“Are they native to the region?” another asked. “They look rather rabid.”
“I’m not sure what we’re looking at,” another one said.
If they hadn’t all been sociologists, it might have occurred to them that the roily wonder were unprepared souls, moments from the clarity of their deaths, tumbling through terrifying illusions and deepening obscuration before their inescapable fall over the precipice into yet another suffering world.
But they were who they were. They couldn’t think in an other-minded way. They turned from the window and regarded their dinner, which had been served. Collectively, they prodded the mass on their plates with their forks.
“What kind of fish is this supposed to be,” one of them said. “It’s not that damn orange roughy again I hope.”
But it was, the waiter guessed, or had been.
Midway in the journey, additional parties boarded the train, including a girl my age and her mother. Picking up speed, the train tore past a truck parked under a dying cottonwood, a sign reading CAKES leaning against the tailgate.
“Isn’t that fabulous,” the mother said. “A bit of old Americana.”
“You believe he’s selling cakes,” her handsome, pimpled child said. “He’s not selling cakes, Mother.”
“Oh stop,” her mother said gaily. “Brittany’s so suspicious of everyone,” she announced. “You’d think somebody had smacked her with a board once. She wants to save the polar bears.”
The girl’s pimples reddened. “When did polar bears become funny, Mother? When did they become a punch line?”
“Oh stop. I don’t know. I don’t think they’re funny. They’re dangerous, aren’t they? I remember it wasn’t so long ago that you wanted to be a fashion designer.”
“I have never never wanted to be a…” But her mother called out to a passing steward, “Come sit with us!”
“He works here, Mother,” Brittany said. “He’s an employee. He’s not an enslaved companion like I am.”
“Come join us!” the mother called out to me.
Brittany stared at me, dismayed. It was quickly confirmed that we would both be attending the same school.
“This was supposed to be a three-generational thing, this trip, but Mother died,” Brittany’s mother explained. “It was probably never that great an idea in the first place.”
“Duh,” Brittany said.
“It was her circulation, she’d had poor circulation for years.”
“It’s sad,” Brittany said, “she had to die just to avoid going on this stupid trip.”
“My grandmother died too,” I said.
Brittany gazed at me and decided to allow no quarter.
“Generally that’s what they do,” she said. She turned to the window and wordlessly pointed out the Rio Grande.
Her mother said, “I heard it was much diminished.”
“What have you left us?” Brittany demanded. “You haven’t left us anything!”
“I didn’t drain the Rio Grande, my dear.”
“It’s criminal,” Brittany said.
“Tell me,” her mother said, “when was the last time you read a good book by a polar bear?”
Brittany raised her hands in the air as though awaiting an assistant to prepare them for surgery.
“Would you like a glass of ginger ale or something?” the steward asked them.
“A glass of ginger ale would b
e just the thing,” Brittany said, “unless you have a bottle of Tylenol PM and a quart of bourbon.”
“Oh stop,” her mother said, and laughed.
One of the social workers was heard expressing guilt about taking the time off. But they agreed they were all sick of their work—the smirking, nodded-out caregivers, the burns, the bruises, the shit in the snowsuits…They needed a break, this break.
“My clients are these kids who if you don’t check on them weekly end up as discovered bodies in some storage box from Bed Bath and Beyond,” another said. He then sneezed violently, twice, without apology.
Brittany rolled her eyes. She had a small notebook in which she wrote frequently. That morning, for instance, she had complained about the inconceivable absence of Weetabix at breakfast. It was a healthful given in this life, was it not, so why wasn’t it available? In fact, why were so many staples becoming unavailable? I had a notebook, too, much like hers but nothing had been written in mine. I could tell that Brittany was thinking that if we became roommates she would positively die. She opened her notebook and with a silver pen wrote in it rapidly.
Her mother commenced speaking to me at length. Her name was Freida and she described herself as an eco-critic, an authority on what she referred to as “the verge.” The country was on the verge and had been for some time, the verge that people thought would go on forever. The hiking trails, the aquariums, the infertility treatments, the oxygen nutritional supplements continuing in cheerful tandem with the oil-soaked birds, the twelve-lane highways with bicycle supplements, the tailings dumps and filthy rivers and deserts blackened with solar panels, the billions of plastic bags translated in magical symbiosis into ethically responsible leisure equipment. Freida enjoyed a flourishing career addressing the verge, speaking at a variety of institutions to well-heeled, attentive and concerned yet complacent audiences. The penurious rabble—a term which Freida took pains to attribute to Hegel—were seldom in evidence, though they were a significantly significant component of the verge.