by Joy Williams
She took pride in her specialty and enjoyed explaining her work, which was to spiritualize the wants of consumers. Our spiritual development depended upon transcending nature. It is our moral destiny to technologically dominate the earth. The managed enhanced invented artificial environment would be quite lovely once the messiness was past.
It was rather a rip-off of Teilhard de Chardin, she admitted, but presented in a jollier, more digestible manner. In any case she made boatloads of money which was how she managed to send Brittany off for schooling.
“How did your family manage to afford the tuition?” she inquired.
“I think my mother put everything she perceived valuable on the block,” I said.
“Ahh, things,” Freida said dismissively. “What is your mother’s profession?”
“She’s a homemaker,” I said uncertainly.
“Homemakers without homes,” Freida said. “That is precisely our coming condition.”
Terminating this lazy conversational exchange about my absent mother, she turned to Brittany.
“Can’t you put something on those spots, dear?” she said, referring to the eruptions on her daughter’s face.
“They’re me, Mother,” Brittany said.
“Oh they hardly are,” Freida said.
The train sped over gulleys and draws through the warp and woof of blueing air changing to dark, a dull yellow light enveloping us all for an instant. The sociologists remarked passingly on the emptiness unaffected by the ten thousand human lives commencing every hour by most recent estimates.
Dinnertime had come and gone and we sat studying our desserts. Brittany pushed aside her dish holding a horridly browning pear half sunk in syrup and studied her notebook. These were her thoughts on a story called “The Overcoat” which had been assigned by a former preceptor. We move overcoat by overcoat toward a dreadful end of which we never think…The author’s characters are made half of flesh and blood and half of vapor, proof of the absurdity and futility that…She crosshatched this out. A character in a story cannot be made of flesh and blood, not even half. She was astonished at how insincere she could be, but her mother was always questioning the authenticity of the authentic and urged her to do so as well.
Reflected in the window glass, everyone’s plates were being removed.
“My daughter considers herself a post-humanist,” Freida said.
Brittany stifled a gasp.
“I’m sorry, dear, but that is what you announced once.” Then to our horror she winked at me.
This naturally destroyed any possibility of accord between Brittany and me. In our brief time together at school, Brittany mocked me to others as Sheep, as Mutton. She said I was a brain-dead dupe whose mind had quite possibly been spayed. I felt no animosity toward her however. I could even admire the way she once argued in class that belief in the soul was nihilistic. It doesn’t seem nihilistic, she said, but it is because then the ever more rapid destruction of the world doesn’t seem so dreadful…
A star shot for a long time through the pale night. “Grandma,” Brittany said somberly. Another star fell down the night’s dark throat. “Grandma’s little dog.”
…who had not long survived her death, the medicine upon which he relied—medicine which cost twenty dollars a day and which Champagne had already been on for over nine hundred days, with some serious side effects including extreme hair loss, gingivitis, and diarrhea—having been suspended. Her mother defended this decision by arguing that Champagne had long ago exceeded the median survival time for his progressive disease and was closing in on the upper range beyond which lay only the big cold kennel. She also pointed out that the only person who had unequivocally loved the difficult creature was gone, which would make a great difference in the quality of his life. So the medication was withdrawn and his decline was swift.
“Don’t romanticize that Champagne,” Freida said. “He didn’t even want to be with Grandma as she lay there on her deathbed. He was always in the kitchen, whining under the table.”
“There aren’t meteors in meteor showers anymore,” one of the sociologists proclaimed. “It’s just space junk from rockets and satellites.”
Brittany was searching for a fresh page in her notebook. There was the Overcoat again, which she made no attempt to conceal from me. It is primarily a ghost story…There were meticulous drawings of a sumptuous coat, wrapped around an idealized female form, the face hidden in the upraised collar.
She looked furtively at her mother and glared at me.
“The big question for your generation,” her mother was saying, “is do you want to share the future or not?”
The train wicked something sizeable away from the tracks. An instant before, whatever it was had stood mesmerized by the single white eye of disturbing brightness hastening toward it.
* * *
—
The school was an old sanatorium surrounded by beetle-ravaged pines and staffed with nervous self-regard by arguably the cleverest minds in the country. Each student lived alone in a small spare room. All of them were children of divorce. It was practically a requirement. The place was monkish, the rooms always cold. There were no playing fields or gymnasiums. I realized I had somewhat been expecting gardens, laboratories and libraries. There were no books, no paper. One was simply supposed to remember the gnomic things the instructors uttered. Most schools told their captives many things without teaching them anything, filling them not with wisdom but the conceit of wisdom. This was wrong, I learned. Things would be different here.
At orientation in a cleared but stumpy patch of woods, a small professor with a resounding voice addressed us.
“What if a demon crept into your loneliest loneliness some day or night and said: ‘This life as you live it at present and have lived it, you must live it once more and innumerable times after that and there will be nothing new in it but every pain and every joy and every sorrow and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must come to you again and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself.’ ”
A boy beside me began to cry; another muttered, “I don’t want to be here. I had no say in the matter,” while a third said, “Who asked to be born, not me.” I had been so restricted in my dealings with others that I found this last complaint intriguing, much as I had marveled at the loudness of Freida’s laughter.
The little man in the clearing continued.
“Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse this demon? Or would you experience a tremendous moment in which you would answer: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything so divine!’ If the thought of this spider and this moonlight acquired power over you it would transform you and perhaps crush you for the answer to the question with regard to all and everything—do you want this all once more and also for innumerable times?—would lie as the heaviest burden upon your life. Or, cause it the greatest sanctified and eternally sealed joy.”
“This is such a tremendous lot to ask of us,” someone complained softly.
The student-inmates sat on benches in a sloppy circle. When there was complete silence once again, the professor, returning to the terror of his subject, screamed: “But I omitted a line!”
And the upperclassmen, all nine of them, screamed: “The eternal sandglass of existence will be turned again and thou with it, thou speck of dust!!!”
Nietzsche had always been the beginning and the end of the induction ceremony. It was a tradition.
The new students could not leave the campus for a year. We could not receive letters or packages, nor, naturally, could we send any. The instructors were distant, the texts obscure, the weather oppressive. The school was in a deep circular valley surrounded by dying trees. Many of the buildings and much of the furniture was crafted from the wood o
f these trees and had beautiful striated patterning, rivers of darkness almost purple in the pale grain. We knew nothing of the outside world’s affairs, nor could we imagine what we were being groomed for. Perhaps the ruthless and painful requirements of nothing.
The place vanquished Brittany almost immediately. She burnt her beautiful notebooks and was taken away a shuddering ruin.
* * *
—
Early in the winter of my second year, my mother, with great difficulty, broke through the communication prohibition with the news of my father’s accident. Mothers die again and again, fathers but once, and my own father, on the threshold of that singular event, had been struck by a snapped winch in his boatyard.
“Him and those dreadful boats,” my mother said.
I flew back across the country in an old plane that was being scrapped after this, her final flight. The passengers, upon hearing this announcement, applauded. The landing was exceedingly rough which the pilot blamed on people on the ground who were fooling around with lasers.
“Sometimes it’s kids who don’t realize the seriousness of what they’re doing,” he said. “Or it’s gang members or people disposed to mischief and criminal behavior in general, or sometimes it’s adults who’ve consumed hearty amounts of drugs or alcohol. Anyway, we made it. Have a nice day.”
In the hospital room, my strong and capable father had been reduced to a crushed and twisted stranger. I was startled by the number of visitors there. One woman brought a small pillow with the words speeds the daedal boat as a dream in needlepoint and placed it beneath my father’s cruelly swollen head. Too troubled to ask her what it meant, I went to the nurse’s station and asked if they had a dictionary. “Not in this place, dear,” one of them said.
“What is daedal?” I asked my mother.
“Ingeniously formed, skillful. From Daedalus who built the Cretan labyrinth. What are you learning at that school anyway?”
She ran her fingers through her hair and looked around the crowded room. “Who are all these people,” she demanded. “Did he sleep with half the town?”
I didn’t know them either though my mother seemed a stranger as well. Indeed, I almost wanted to sniff her, to smell her as an animal would her kind, for verification.
“Let’s go to the cafeteria and have some cocoa,” this creature said.
“I don’t want any cocoa.”
But we went down to the cafeteria in the bowels of the dreadful building, and sat at a Formica table upon which someone had etched in tiny script…hell…
People at the other tables were staring into their computer screens. A teacher at school said that the online world—he called it the online world—employs only the parts of the brain that handle temporary fleeting minutiae and bulks up that part so that deep thinking is impossible, deeper understanding becomes elusive.
No one was weeping.
I stared at the letters. I put my hand over them, over hell.
“Your father never believed in you,” my mother sighed. “Oh I’m not saying he didn’t love you. He just didn’t believe you’d been there, but I did. I knew you were special, a little chrisom child. And it used to weigh on me terribly. You were in some timeless future where you were charged with transformation and I had to keep you alive and it was hard, hard, you know, but now I have to ask you, what have you done with this information, what are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t have any information, Mom.” I realized that life never seemed more unreal than when I was with my mother.
“You don’t think you’re still there, do you, and this is all a misunderstanding? Because this is not a misunderstanding.”
“Poor Daddy,” I said.
“Oh yes,” my mother said, blinking. “I’m beside myself, I guess that’s obvious. Goodness. You’re too skinny, why are you so skinny? Where are you staying? I’ll give you money for a hotel. And there’s some more, for school. But after that, no more. It’s all gone.”
“Can’t I stay with you at home?”
“The house is gone, sold. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to stay in this town. I’ve said my good-byes to your father.”
“How did you say them?”
My mother ignored this question. “I’m going to a visionary conference. It’s at a resort on one of those enormous lakes your father loathed so much. But this one’s much closer to where you are. It’s only three hundred miles or so. We’ll be neighbors practically!”
“I thought they were supposed to be pretty impractical,” I said.
“Who?”
“Visionaries. That’s the definition, isn’t it?”
My mother looked at me. “It’s quite a lineup and I’m giving it one last shot. It’s not like anything I’ve tried before and I’ve tried everything as you might have guessed. There’s going to be some new thinking at this conference. Pathways opening up to new solutions. There’ll be scholars, scientists, lyricists, religious leaders there, the occasional party to keep our spirits up. I’m so fortunate to have heard about this. Try to be happy for me.”
“No business leaders?”
“Of course not. Why are you being so unpleasant? These people are the new generation of guides. Very qualified. I’m going to audit all the panels, as many as I can. I don’t care about the credits. I don’t need the credits.”
“I thought my school was supposed to be full of guides.”
“Oh I don’t know about that now. I guess not. That place isn’t as eminent as it used to be. I got a little behind on my research. I wish I had hypnotists work with you when you were a toddler, Lamb. You’re continuing to be denied access to the most important part of your life, the future you had in death! I think you’re just being stubborn.”
She was called away then for a moment and when she returned, she said, “He’s gone.”
* * *
—
I was afraid I would not see my mother again, or it might be more accurate to say I was afraid that were we to meet, I would not recognize her, which is far more terrible, a terrible thing. But she said she would come to the hotel the following day and we would go to a small memorial service for my father and then the gravesite, for the dead are buried quickly now.
I do not know how I managed to pass the night. When I descended to the lobby the following afternoon I noticed a television screen over the reception desk. A film was running of a large bird making careful refinements to a coarsely built nest. I watched it for a time uneasily.
“Weren’t you watching that yesterday?” the clerk asked.
“No.”
“But you noticed the pole outside when you checked in, didn’t you? Big pole with a platform on top, camera on another pole angled toward it? Hard to miss.”
“This is real time, then?”
“Well it was,” the clerk said. “But she flew into a truck or something. Or the mate couldn’t find fish. Weather’s been crappy, unsettled, water’s cloudy. There are any number of theories.”
“So when was this?”
“A year ago at least.”
“But why are you still showing it?”
“Isn’t that self-evident?” he said. “Most people like looking at it.”
I turned my back on the film and on the fastidious and useless preparations being recorded there and sat on a divan before a table on which lay an untidy stack of newspapers. The divan was uncomfortable but I must have dozed because I felt startled awake when a woman sat down heavily beside me.
“Do you know what day it is?” she asked.
“I do. Very much.”
“My Marie would have been fifteen years of age today.” She tapped the newspaper on top of the pile with a gnawed, not very clean finger. It was open to the obituary page and the finger was being directed to a black-bordered memoriam of a child in a sunsuit holding a book upside d
own. Having noted first the book, the title of which was not legible, and the blonde ringleted child only later, I felt at an immediate disadvantage.
“Two,” the woman said. “I’ve been doing this for thirteen years now and I’ll be doing it thirteen more if I’m still drawing breath. It’s working out pretty well. Lots of people know her now, hundreds. She’s not so shy anymore. She used to be wicked shy. She didn’t like to have her picture took.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Imagine her a little. Like what would she be doing right now?”
I shook my head.
“Wouldn’t cost you nothing to imagine this child,” she said. “I’m not asking for the skin off your back!” She was rocking back and forth and seemed to be revolving at the same time. “It would be a big help to Marie,” she cried. “She appreciates it. Marie wouldn’t be nothing without your help.”
I said, “She’s drinking apple juice. It tastes good. She’s enjoying a moment by herself.”
The woman scowled. “Why would she want to be by herself?”
“She’s in a pretty seaside garden, she’s planting bulbs,” I said without hope.
“Too late in the year for bulbs,” she said.
“Marie,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, not brightening in the slightest. “I’m glad she didn’t live to see all this fakery. Everyone pretending things will be all right. You pretending.” Primly, she folded up the paper and went to the lobby’s desk where she conferred with the clerk. He appeared to be sympathetic to what she was saying. Perhaps she was a palace pet. Many public spaces have them, I’d been told. Perhaps she brought luck to those who helped her in small ways. They both looked at me with disappointment. Above them in its aerie the bird was turning a brown, prettily mottled egg with her beak.
I went outside to wait for my mother. I sat at a table and was presented with a glass of water. I moved to pick it up but it fell from my hand toward the floor. I watched it falling in a sort of trance. In that moment of its falling I knew my mother would never arrive.