by Joy Williams
“True!”
“The ones who came before us, they named the animals, the flowers, the trees, the lowliest bush. But they weren’t the right ones. So now it doesn’t matter when all that’s gone.”
“That’s our purgative.”
“Prerogative, asswipe. What’s important is we’re men. Both as individual and horde we are…”
“Men!”
“That’s right. Even the ladies. Capable of anything!”
They called themselves the Fallout and they invited me to accompany them to a place they called the party house, a place they had been frequenting and were tenderly nostalgic about. This was how they described their feelings about the place to me—tenderly nostalgic.
“It’s like your granddaddy’s house,” they explained to me, “if you’d had one of those dear make-believe granddaddys.”
The party house was a farmstead where an old professor had been dying for some time. Whenever they arrived he thought they’d come to take care of his beloved horses, but there weren’t any horses. If ever there had been they must have starved or wandered out of the collapsed barns and through the open fencing long ago.
Some of the girls in the group believed the professor realized there were no horses but knew that admitting this would be the end of him. The boys didn’t understand why he wouldn’t want his end to come. He wasn’t stupid. He was crippled and old—God, he was older than anyone they’d ever met—and if he persisted, someone could come by and take advantage of him, hurt him, maybe even murder him, and he would die disillusioned.
“Yeah, but everyone dies disillusioned,” one of the girls said. She carried a desert tortoise in an open picnic basket. A green swastika was painted on its shell, not the Nazi swastika but its reverse, one of the most ancient and complex symbols of history.
“Some people look at this and freak,” the girl said. “They think we’re marauding skinheads.”
“That’s just a shell,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s a desert tortoise.”
“She’s not in there anymore,” I said. “She’s been removed.”
Another girl said, “Some researcher in California wanted us to send her there so she could hook up with this tortoise boy they got. You know how they get a tortoise to shoot his little tortoise wad when he’s not so inclined? They give him an electric shot.”
Shock, she was corrected.
“But we said no, no,” she went on, “we won’t give her up because you might not send her back, that’s what we said to the researcher in California.”
“We used to think she was lucky but now we don’t,” a boy said, regarding the domed shell, “since somebody who will remain nameless and is no longer with us scooped her from her home to see what she looked like and then of course she didn’t look anything like what she really was…”
“But we’re not going to abandon her,” the girl carrying the basket said. “We’re sweethearts. That’s why we play along with the professor. ‘Your students have come back to take care of your horses,’ we tell him. ‘We’re the farriers returning from the age of iron,’ we say.”
“He might be dead this time around though. You can’t live on pain pills forever at that age.”
“But we can,” a boy said. “We metabolize them better.”
The Fallout were cheerful, ruthless, resourceful, self-absorbed and undespairing. Despair, they explained to me, was caused by the attempt to live a life of virtue, justice and understanding. Despair arose when one tried to understand and justify human existence and behavior. This was the most important thing they had learned as students. It used to be you had to be a small child, practically an infant, or awakened and enlightened in the extreme to be legitimately undespairing, but they scoffed at such restrictions. The Fallout certainly weren’t babies, nor would they be the resigned and ingravescent old. They doubted they’d last the year out. They didn’t care.
“Where did you get the bicycles?” I asked.
A boy admitted they’d belonged to unfortunate children who had drowned for lack of a ladder. The tanks were everywhere to catch and hold water—you must have noticed them, he said—but only the old ones had ladders. The tanks had once been rather beautiful but in time they’d collapsed and the new ones were uglier, larger and progressively more crude. Building an escape ladder had always been one of the cardinal rules of construction, though the guardians of these children, in their haste, had frequently forgotten this.
Some of the bikes bore colorful decals of wizards and skulls, tornadoes, panthers straddling rockets. “A lot of these kiddies were military issue,” a boy explained, “copying their daddies’ secret program patches.”
“Secret, Secret, Secret,” the Fallout yipped.
And so I accompanied them yipping and laughing to the party house, an arid farm surrounded by dead orchards. The professor was still in living residence and the Fallout found this delightful. They greeted him and exclaimed over the continuing good health of his horses, after which they retired into the back reaches of his property for their self-medicating regimens.
The professor was sitting in a checkered wing chair with what looked like a tablecloth over his knees. The window was open and a wind pushed moodily around in the dusk.
“ ‘He’s mad that trusts in a horse’s health,’ ” he said. “King Lear. Are you one of my students?”
“No,” I said.
“The ones who were just here tell me they are, but I can see right through them as the saying goes.”
“I would like to learn but I can’t seem to.”
“Have to know the proper channels, though the channels are always shifting and don’t stay proper for long. But I’m pretty much out of commission as a pilot. I took quite a tumble and at my age when the bones break they stay broken. Where did you come from? Where were you born?”
I named the town on the coast and the word seemed awkward in my mouth. Oddly, in that moment, I had a memory of mispronouncing the word detritus. It’s de try tus for heaven’s sakes, one of my teachers had scolded.
“You’re not trying to return there, are you?” asked the professor. “You’ll find it much changed.”
“No, I’m not going there.”
“I believe they’re strictly limiting entry though exceptions can always be made. The courts are all there now.”
“I don’t have a destination really.”
“Probably because there aren’t any. To have one was always rather a luxury.”
“The last time I saw my mother she said she was going to a facility on a large lake where a visionary conference was taking place. Perhaps you heard of it?”
He smiled. “So many conferences and congresses. They were so in vogue a while back. Certainly the past is merely a grammatical construct, but that really was some time ago.”
“My mother says that time observes me differently because I was dead for a while.”
“Yes, well that will do it,” the professor said blandly. “I was honored at an environmental conference there, their last one. Loss was the theme. Reflections on loss. Ways to navigate loss. The opportunities in loss. How to make loss work for you…What a bunch of fruitcakes. There was one panel…I don’t have the program after all this time, but I remember the title very clearly, the title is just dancing in the air before my eyes, I can see it more clearly than I see you, even.” He made as if to scribble in the air with his finger. “The Potentiality of Landscape’s Emptiness: The Integrity of Half Measures.”
“What were they honoring you for?”
“My area of expertise, all the little grasses. I spent my life studying grasses. I liked the prairie grasses best. They once could have survived the worst, you know, whether fire or ice, their roots went so deep. That’s what the worst was thought to be once—freeze and flame. They were eradicated instead by simple human commitment, t
hat and the fact that the determination to survive that other forms of life ofttime exhibit impels many people to extremes of destruction.” He fussed with the cloth on his lap. “Regardless,” he said, “I couldn’t attend the conference, the obsequies. I’d taken my final spill, my last fall. It was like missing my own funeral.” He glanced at the window and quickly away. “You’re a patient little thing, aren’t you, to have no idea how long ago that was.”
There was the sound of distant laughter and the faint smell of smoke.
“They’re going to burn whatever’s left down one of these nights,” he said. “Do me a favor, would you, shut that window over there. That was the horses’ favorite window. They’d stick their big heads in and visit with me. But they don’t anymore. If you’re blessed enough to save something, it doesn’t stay saved, are you aware of that?”
The window wouldn’t budge. I tried to rock it in its frame. The glass was old, thick, voluted.
“Watch out for splinters,” the professor warned. “When I was a little boy my best friend died of defenestration. He was fascinated with windows. He thought there was another world out there and people were forever trying to convince him it was the same one. He was an exceptionally frustrated child. The possibilities of the window were for him the only possibilities that mattered. Death by jumping out a window was a cause of death just made for Woodrow. Well he found his window in the tallest building in town. It was only four stories high but he was dashed to pieces of course. His mother permitted the harvest of some of his bones for cadaver wafers. Someone talked her into it. Now there’s no telling how many people with osteoarthritis of the spine—desperate enough to assent to the surgeon’s knife—have a bit of Woodrow’s cartilage in them. Knowing that would disappoint him, I’m certain. He didn’t care for people much. Not that he was a mean boy, he just wasn’t charitable, and his bones ended up wafting around in others, helping others. Goodness, I haven’t talked this much in years.”
The window came down abruptly, meeting the rough sill.
“I thought it would make more of a fuss,” he said.
The room seemed thunderously still with the window shut.
“Quiet, isn’t it,” the professor noted. “As if we’ve been punched right back to the Middle Ages, a time characterized by a quality of silence quite unimaginable today. That’s why music then had an almost supernatural power.” He sighed. “Thank you, dear, I’ve indulged myself quite long enough. I should have gone where you’re going when I had the chance but our lives don’t move in a horizontal fashion anymore, perhaps they never did. I took my disability far too seriously and the years proceeded, the calamities piled up. I’m truly incapacitated now, wouldn’t be able to serve. Lola won’t let anyone die there, that’s one of her rules. She runs a tighter ship.”
“Who’s Lola?”
“Why she’s in the place you seek, the facility, as you so formally and politely called it, on the lake. Your mother’s last resort is under new management now. No more of this rational-use, academic-integrated approach, sustainable-compromise crapola. Lola steers a different vessel under a different star.”
“But I’m not looking for her,” I said. The room was suffocating with the window closed but had a faint familiar smell, like crushed leaves.
“Woe when you feel homesick for the land and there is no longer any land,” he said. “But that’s where you’re headed, I’m fairly certain, and Lola will have to do. Now I want you to take my truck. I have a fine old truck in that blue outbuilding you passed. I used it for years to trailer my babies here. It’s in the cellarage. Just open the doors down there. I’d love to think that Lola will welcome you but it’s quite possible she won’t. But such a loss at this point hardly matters, does it.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Come, I can use you, said the peculiar stranger.
—“Kienast” Robert Walser
This is the way the world looks.
The world looks…trashed.
—William Gass
Poor old Big Girl. A crow could not be made blacker than her sick waters. The setting sun regarded her and threw a half-hearted shimmer over her flabby surface. For an instant she turned a promising silver. When someone is dying, humming rolling and cracking noises wheel around the body for up to fifteen hours, unheard and unacknowledged. It is a scientific fact, though suppressed. Big Girl had popped and droned and shrieked and snapped for years as was often the case with water, but had been silent now for just as long.
A woman holding a martini glass stood beside a child on the shore. The boy had caught a small fish and was looking at it unhappily.
You can’t start thinking that fish has a story, Jeffrey, the woman said, her hand on the rod’s line from which the fish feebly struggled. That way lies madness.
The fish was not rose-moled stippled and lovely but gray and gaunt as though it had lived its brief life in a drainpipe.
This fish is part of your story only, Jeffrey, the woman continued. This lake is here to produce fish for your pleasure and repulsion and to instill in you a sense of power and pity.
She turned, the martini glass deftly turning with her, and looked behind her.
What are you staring at! she snapped.
What’s your name again?” Lola asked. “You’re not old enough to be part of the Institute. You don’t even look as though it’s your destiny to join in a great experience.”
“Oh!” Khristen laughed, embarrassed.
“It’s one of my favorite first lines in literature. It was my destiny to join in a great experience. Of course the narrator was utterly mistaken. Human destiny has quite played itself out. You don’t have to agree of course. But it’s so lovely you brought Julian’s truck! Maybe we’ll start the tours again—they were very popular. Some prankster drove our previous vehicle into the lake and the silt swallowed it.”
“Who gave the tours?” Khristen asked.
“Oh, one of us,” Lola said vaguely. “Most of our arrivals come via Mr. Stroup. I know Honey did. Mr. Stroup used to be a preacher. He preached a lot on the seven bowls when that was in vogue. Then he was an electrician, one of those unlicensed ones you use in desperation. He had a white van. It used to be an ambulance but the only thing that remained in it from its heyday was the tip jar. But Stroup hasn’t been by for a while.”
“What are the seven bowls?”
“The seven horrifying judgments, the ones that show no restraint. The seven gleaming bowls full of the wrath of God. Plague, war, the destruction of great cities, heat, the dying of the oceans, endless darkness.”
“But that’s only six,” Khristen said.
Lola laughed loudly. She was tall, with blurred features except for her prominent eyes. “You’re a quick one, I can never do all seven. One always escapes me.”
“That’s all right,” Khristen said.
They were sitting on what Lola referred to as the “veranda” on the destitute grounds of the razed resort. The lake, which had taken on mythic proportions in Khristen’s mind, was not visible, but a small neatly maintained motel was. Behind the veranda a half-demolished building leaned toward them as though listening.
“Tell me about the professor. Poor Julian’s a sad tale. Were any of the horses still there?”
“The people who were visiting him were pretending there were horses but I didn’t see any.”
“Oh he had so many of them! Percherons they were. Premarin foals. There was a hormone that pharmaceutical interests got from the urine of pregnant mares that was much in demand but there was no use for the resultant foals, which were just shipped off to slaughter. It was a big business and probably will be again. There’s no expiration date on the resourcefulness of greed and cruelty. Julian rescued, oh, at least a hundred of them to my knowledge, though he never caught up to the reality of the numbers. He was an expert on grasses, really had a wa
y with them. Of course the foals could obliterate a meadow with their sinless crushing jaws in no time and the irony of the situation depressed him terribly. No horses at all? He loved them so. They used to stick their big heads in the window of his bedroom. I believe they loved him too. Wish we could have gotten him over here when he was still mobile. He’s just going to die for nothing now.”
In the distance, past neglected gardens, was an enormous crumbling amphitheater. Lola pointed toward it.
“That environmental conference you spoke of, dear, the one you said your mother was pilgriming off to, that was a very long time ago you have to realize. Time doesn’t have the tolerance with us that it used to. For all the good it did, that conference could have taken place before you were born.”
Lola was in agreement with the old professor’s memory of the place. A large meeting of the usual maundering and hypocritical leaders had occurred before the total abandonment of civilized, if fruitless, discussion. Khristen was no doubt an orphan by now, sharing that designation with a primary part of the populace and most of the non-human inhabitants of what was still classified, mostly out of laziness, as the natural world.
“Are you hungry?” Lola asked.
“I am very hungry,” Khristen admitted.
Lola looked disappointed.
“We have dinner at seven but few attend. They’ve all got ailments of course and special diets are impossible. Some of them can’t even eat a mashed potato.”
“I could.”
“If you could hang on until tomorrow the little boy staying at the motel with his mother is having a birthday party and there should be cake at least.”
“I believe I saw them,” Khristen said. “He had caught a fish.”
“A fish!” exclaimed Lola. “Was it rotting from the tail up?”
“I wasn’t that close to see. It didn’t look rotting. It was mostly head though.”
“That’s quite remarkable,” Lola said, “that he would catch a fish. To dream of a fish means death, you know. What did he do with it?”