by Joy Williams
Eventually I found my way to the boatyard where the mourners had gathered. They were not the same people I had seen in the hospital. The food and drink had been consumed and they were now in the process of carrying everything out of my father’s lodging. They did not address me or even look at me. They pocketed the silver, rolled up the rugs and removed the glasses and blankets. My father had few books. I recalled him reading little other than those on boats and boat-building. He had enjoyed all commentary on the sea, taking particular note of captains who had been relieved of their command or who, in disgrace, had been reassigned. These volumes, too, were taken.
Though these were terrible omens, I felt my only recourse was to return to studies I could not comprehend and trust that the future would eventually disclose itself as it had to all beings in the past.
Back at school I tried to describe the mourners’ behavior to a classmate.
“That couldn’t have happened that way,” Jack said. “People coming into your dead dad’s place and taking everything.”
“Everything.”
“All at once and without saying a word?…They take up a collection for you?”
“They did not.”
“I’ve heard of wakes getting out of hand but nothing like this. That’s some seriously disordered mourning.”
“I don’t think this was a wake.”
“You want me to help figure this out or not? It was a festivity. People were eating and drinking and walking around talking about the deceased. That’s a wake. But then they up and robbed you of all the stuff you were supposed to inherit. It’s just the damnedest thing.”
Jack was a caring boy, not lachrymose and knowing like his two sisters who had time-shares in Ohio and North Carolina respectively—that is, they were still in prison. He had brought his powder-coated El Camino to school along with all the parts he’d been accumulating, the second engine, the vent window gaskets, the tail-light housings, the two doors complete with glass. But he was not allowed to work on it and was forbidden to drive it.
“You know the lion cub that was supposed to be coming to the zoo back where I’m from?” he said. “The one from the other zoo? The one I’ve been telling you about and waiting on to see when I get out of here? It’s not coming now since the zoos have been washed away.”
He confessed that he was at a loss as to what he could look forward to now.
He clandestinely installed photo paper on a wall in his room with a black-maned lion looking for all the world like it was striding down a darkened hallway right toward you.
* * *
—
The same questions were being asked but more unrelentingly.
Why are you here? Why are you here? What is the purpose of human life on this earth?
The classroom was cold. One of the instructors was speaking and his breath was visible in the air. I studied the reindeers romping over my mittens. Many of my clothes had once belonged to a much younger child.
There was a pause and a student said, “I was peeling an orange this morning and I noticed that the peel I was about to throw into the garbage reminded me of squamous cells, those tiny epidermal flakes that fall off our skin. I then realized that without knowing it we all of us are sowers who spread tiny particles of skin here and there along our path. We create with our very waste.”
“Interesting,” the instructor said.
“Where’d you get an orange?” another student demanded. “I haven’t tasted an orange in years.”
“Yeah, where’d you get an orange!” several challenged.
“It’s an example,” the boy said. “I’m offering an example.” He muttered, “I wasn’t really peeling an orange.”
“Interesting,” the instructor said again, “but we are not discussing creativity. We are discussing the state. Let us return to the state. We are dominated by large organizations, governments, churches, industrial and financial giants. All these are large and they grow larger as the dinosaurs did. It is visible to everyone that their level of intelligence and their ability to look into the future are exceedingly small. They cannot change, they can only expand. As long as there was room and the means to expand they could thrive. But now it is no longer possible to expand. Growth in this way is impossible. Now it is not merely a duty but a necessity to control, to restrain and to concentrate.”
“Is individual growth possible?” someone questioned.
“No.”
With this, the class was dismissed.
“He is so boring,” the boy beside me whispered, “but he’s so cute.”
In the dining hall, supper was powdered eggs and toast again. It was the fifth evening this had been so. The school had been in some disarray ever since the disappearance of a senior scholar, the Caliph the students called him. He was an avid hiker and climber and the fear was that he had fallen or encountered some mishap in the mountains. Some of the teachers set out to search for him—they wouldn’t allow the students to accompany them—but they found no trace of him.
“Well I always found him somewhat repellent,” a girl named Lucinda said. “His person as well as his mind. Someone probably murdered him because he was so repellent.”
“I never understood a thing he said,” Jack offered.
“He would have been disappointed if you had,” Lucinda said. “If any of us had.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Jack said to me, “what happened at your dad’s place? That wasn’t a wake, it was a burglary.”
“I adore that word,” Lucinda said. “Burglarious is even better. Like This burglarious place is sucking out our souls.” She had briefly been Brittany’s roommate and had outmaneuvered her at every turn.
“Do you know what daedal means,” I asked.
“Sure,” Lucinda said.
No one believed the scholar had been murdered. Lucinda was just being playful. He had suffered a tragic fall was the gradually accepted opinion, somewhere in the unforgiving mountains.
* * *
—
It was becoming apparent that in the Caliph’s absence, the school was unraveling. People spoke of him in the present tense to no avail. I was in my third year now, a junior, but the class above me did not have the opportunity to scream at the freshmen: The eternal sandglass of existence will be turned again and thou with it, thou speck of dust!! There was no incoming class. Everyone missed the tradition of this spider and this moonlight though the distinction between reincarnation and recurrence remained blurry for some. I felt that if I had to relive once more my time here since my father’s death and my mother’s disappearance, it would be as perplexing as before—the horrid food, the mysterious lectures, the childish outfits everyone wore, the enshrinement of doubt. I would not feel joyfully sanctioned. I had learned nothing and could not recognize an illusion from my left hand.
The situation in the world outside our sheltered if dreary valley had changed, we were told. Priorities had changed. Hence the lack of an incoming class. But there were even more pressing problems. There was talk of a third of the once familiar world outside us being gone. A third of the whole. The remainder was still manageable, it was rumored; in fact things had to be managed more than ever. The two thirds left couldn’t be a whole, strangely enough.
More and more classes were canceled. We would meet at dusk in one of the school’s many courtyards discussing the sounds that had been going on for weeks.
It sounded like cars, trucks backfiring.
A number of cars or trucks backfiring for a considerably long time.
That’s what people say gunfire sounds like.
Nobody says that anymore.
It didn’t sound like guns at all, more like explosions.
Prolonged explosions.
What about the smell?
The odor?
It was more like thunder, rolling, rolling thund
er.
Mother Nature batting last.
Nobody says that anymore.
Then it was announced that the campus would be closed for a newly determined holiday. The explanation was that they were going to paint the dormitories, replace the boiler, modernize the kitchen and build a library. No one even bothered to refute these ridiculous claims. The last meal was a breakfast of powdered eggs and toast. Grim-faced parents arrived for their children in monster trucks hauling elaborate travel homes or in waxed limousines. Jack’s sisters (who had been released from prison) arrived, and they all left in the El Camino, though the additional parts had to be left behind. All the prisons had been emptied, the opera houses and theaters closed. Lucinda’s parents picked her up in a hearse. They were funeral “directors” and had more money and business than God, Lucinda always said. She invited me to go with her but I demurred.
“I like you,” Lucinda said. “You have no self-love. But you don’t have any sense of self-preservation either, which I hate to admit is very important to me. I don’t think we’ll see each other again.”
We’d heard that the only businesses operating on the outside were casinos where Indians who’d lost their great-grandfathers to smallpox, whose great-grandmothers’ bones resided in the basements of collapsed museums, now enforced the rules, such as they were.
I was the only one escorted to the train station. There was a large painting of a harrow on the wall. “That’s new,” my instructor commented. “Sure looks official, doesn’t it.” The waiting room was deserted. “A parent will be meeting you at the other end, is that right?” the instructor said.
“Yes,” I said.
“The parent knows you’re coming?” He’d heard that one of them had died but damned if he could remember which one. His short-term memory was increasingly failing him. He blushed. He knew he was considered the boring one, the cute one, which was bad enough, but now he had to face the realization that he was getting dumber and more irrelevant with each passing day. He felt faintly euphoric. He was surprised that the trains were still running.
* * *
—
The train lacked a dining car, nor were there sleeping compartments. The lavatories were locked. A dozen people rocked sullenly in broken seats. No one spoke. They slept with their eyes open as the first night passed void of stars. The land was bright with raging fires ringed by sportsmen shooting the crazed creatures trying to escape the flames. The train pushed forward, if fitfully, on designated tracks. It sped by stations but stopped beside empty fields enclosed in wire. Passengers would disembark and not reboard. It stopped where the man and his sign marked CAKES still waited. He darted into the car with a large tray of sweets that were colorfully decorated but hard as stone. People bought them and jammed them into their mouths anyway.
For a time, the train kept sluggish pace with a livestock truck and its cargo of shifting dappled bodies.
The moment I realized that I alone remained on board, the train stopped for good. I climbed down and walked through brittle grasses and over cracked earth until the tracks were no longer visible. I came upon a little grove that was surprisingly green and freshly pleasant except for the packages of meat dumped there. They were wrapped tightly in slim plastic, the cut’s name and weight and the price stamped on a strip of paper that was separated from the meat by an absorbent pad now pink.
A man pulling a cross appeared on the crest of a hill and started down it toward the grove. The butt of the cross rested on a duffel bag tied to a board that was mounted on two wheels. He approached, unsmiling. The cross was sixteen feet long and made from what looked like Styrofoam painted black.
“Good morning,” he said, although it was almost night. “Alleluia.” He laid the cross down carefully. “People who know me call me the Convertor but I tell strangers to call me Larry so they’ll feel more comfortable.” He explained that he was coming up from the south where people still believed, but in the most perfunctory manner. For years he had been traveling back and forth across the country and he would continue to do so, doing God’s work until he was informed that it was done. In these days of woe, more and more people were informing him that it was done.
“I even got beat up as you can see,” Larry said. “Got some of my teeth knocked out.”
He opened his mouth wide and a terrible odor issued forth which dissipated leisurely. He closed his mouth and spoke through barely parted lips again.
“Where you headed?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Yup, that’s the answer I get most frequently. You are not alone. That is, you’re alone of course but there’s others in a likewise situation is what I mean.”
We regarded the meat. There seemed even more of it than there had been before.
“Troubling,” Larry said, “in this pleasant place of respite. Seems I just saw that beef when they was cows.”
We looked at the meats bulging and browning against the constraints of their packaging.
“Ezekiel!” Larry cried in a weak and wavering voice, “Ezekiel was set down in the valley of dry bones by the Lord who said to him ‘Can these bones live?’ and Ezekiel figured well probably no. But then the Lord laid sinews upon them and flesh and breathed into them and they did live…” He raised his hands and waggled them. “Amen,” he said. “But those were bones,” he added. “There was something to work with.”
Then, with more effort than habit and appearance might suggest, he lifted the cross to his shoulder and labored off.
* * *
—
My mother had said, “Even if I was mistaken that night and you didn’t cross over the shadow line, the borderland, do you ever feel that you have died and are walking among those who might have died as well but are not telling?
“Because,” my mother said, “no one tells.”
I thought about that now, as the days I moved through seemed hesitant, as though waiting for something further and not to their benefit to be decided. The people I saw didn’t seem to be traveling. They were milling, like little flies after a rain. Hope no longer found a place to dwell. Even the insects felt it gone. The colt, the cub, the calf, the stones that would be precious jewels deep within the earth. The flowers who, as Wordsworth knew, enjoyed the air they breathed, were aware of nothing but hope’s absence. Something definitely had gone wrong. Even the dead were dismayed.
But then the dead commenced to regain their bearings, their sea legs as it were, and those close to death and the unborn as always. As for the others, they hardly cared who or what it was that was pleading with them now, for everything seemed less touching than before.
For a time I was on a wide highway that had been in the process of being widened further, though a series of stanchions had narrowed it to a single track. No vehicles passed. A gas station attendant told me that only commerce slash security slash essential slash emergency services got fuel, and that temporarily—only on Thursdays and every other Tuesday.
“People are calm though,” he said. “If you’re not calm there’s immediate custody which is not pretty, I’ve seen it. It’s a matter of attitude. If you’ve got the right attitude you’re going to be fine.”
Someone on the road offered me a look through his binoculars which he carried in a pouch around his neck. They were well cared for. Beneath the protective caps the glass was unscratched. A white capsule in the pouch said THROW AWAY DO NOT EAT. But it had not been thrown away.
“Keeps the fungus from getting on the glass,” the man said.
The land looked torn, turned inside out.
At times, moving forward, I pretended I was heading home, like a bird or animal might, stubbornly, to a place it had known for many seasons, the previous season being an exception, the extinction of the place, an exception. Birds and animals must feel like this, I imagined, harboring a faith that only the saints must know, a faith that can
not be betrayed but only transformed. But when I could no longer think of myself, much as I longed to, as a bird or an animal, I grew weary and uncertain. I was not returning home.
A group of adolescents overtook me. They were pushing or riding bicycles and resembled my former classmates not at all.
“Jesus, these little flies,” one girl protested, rearranging a dirty scarf around her face.
“There are flowers that want to be pollinated by flies,” a boy said. “They stink so bad only the flies will come to them.”
“Flies don’t pollinate flowers,” the girl said.
“Yes, they do.”
“Creep,” the girl said.
“You going to the party house?” one of them asked me.
“Is it on a large lake?” I asked.
“No lakes around here,” a boy said. “Maybe further on.”
“Yes, there’s a humongous one further on,” a girl said. “But I don’t think it’s there anymore.”
“She doesn’t know anything about it obviously,” the boy assured me. “Are you a student?”
“I was.”
“We’re students at large,” he said. “The world is our classroom.” They all laughed harshly at this.
“We’ve had lots of learning experiences,” one offered.
“Like we were camping and this guy we didn’t know was there—he was there ahead of us actually—and he was staring at this rock. He stared at it so long that the rock felt threatened I think and it rose up and struck him and killed him.”
“I like the rocks we find with the holes in them,” a boy said.
“Who doesn’t, moron, but here’s our situation. We’re learners and seekers but we don’t know what we’re searching for. We don’t have the words, or the words we have are the wrong ones. And it can’t be otherwise.”