Harrow

by Joy Williams

  “What were the other cards you used to have?”

  “We had one of a pie with accompanying list of ingredients and directions I hear was popular.”

  “Which of these two is the better seller? The one with the room full of people or the one with the room empty? That room’s not even here anymore, is it?”

  “Fire before my time. But you can see there were once considerable banquet facilities. And any number of lecture halls and such.”

  Khristen held a card displaying the room empty. The colors were faded, the linens draping the four long receding trestle tables were gray, the squatty glow of the many lamps a wan yellow. Still, everything was in order, each setting the same, every chair identical to the one beside it. And then, there was the other one, the long room full, every seat taken.

  “They were all kind of obedient, weren’t they,” Khristen noted. “All looking in the same direction. There must have been speakers, presentations.”

  “There’s a Latin phrase for that sort of business,” Lola said. “Those people had a phrase for pretty much everything, it turns out. In this case, festum stultorum. Fools’ feast. I used to think that there’s more people alive at present than all the people who ever lived and that’s why we all feel so strange and everything’s not right. But the fact is that those of us who are alive today are only 5.5 percent of all the people who ever lived. But you know me and numbers. I may be off by a bit.”

  “And that’s probably why we feel so strange and nothing’s right,” Khristen said.

  Despite Lola’s prediction, the rain withdrew. Khristen went outside and walked, counting her steps at first and then not counting. The steaming earth tugged at her, the wind snapped. She thought, This is still a day, it’s still called a day. Below a yellowed rise, the motel appeared in shy certitude. She saw Jeffrey pacing before it.

  “Legal fictions,” he was saying. “A legal fiction has allowed the court to attribute legal personhood not just to autonomous nonconscious nonsentient humans but to trusts, corporations, religious idols and ships.”

  “Hi, Jeffrey.”

  He paused and looked at her. “I’m going to be a judge, you know.”

  “Why not,” she said agreeably.

  “Are you an inhabitant of here or there? My mother says you give her the creeps.”

  Khristen laughed.

  “It’s not a laughing matter, you know. Very little is. Still, you’re correct in dismissing her opinion of you. It’s my opinion of you that matters and I haven’t formed one yet. I find you…opaque. Of course the whole situation is opaque. I expected more incandescence. But I’m just a child. I’m naive in many ways.”

  “Jeffrey!” his mother called from a plaid lounger. “Get over here this minute!”

  “My mother…” he began, “…should be viewed in these circumstances much as the post-disaster present should be understood in relation to the pre-disaster past. She is behaving unsympathetically and without a shred of compassion or consideration but…”

  “Jeffrey! Get your bottom over here now!”

  Jeffrey sighed. “Excuse me a sec.” He trotted off, giving the huge inflatable swan that occupied most of the pool a smack as he passed. Barbara had managed to bring it along under what must have been decidedly difficult conditions. There was the pleasant archaic smell of tanning oil in the air.

  “I have a question,” he said when he returned. “What was your favoritemost thing out there?”

  “Out where?”

  “Favoritemost.” He smacked his forehead. “Good heavens, it’s so easy to regress.”

  “You needn’t regress with me.”

  “Why not? You have the blank expectancy of an extremely young individual. Are you familiar with the works of Kierkegaard?”

  “In school. A bit. Very much in passing,” Khristen confessed.

  “He pathetically wanted the words ‘The Individual’ etched upon his gravestone but that didn’t happen. So little of what we—actors before an anonymous public—hope for in this life actually occurs,” Jeffrey said darkly. “What was carved on his stone was a scrap of a sentimental hymn. I recall but a bit of it: Then the whole struggle entirely disappears. It makes me nauseous to remember the rest.”

  “The leap of faith is what we learned,” Khristen said.

  “Well I would certainly hope so. He also wanted to work catastrophically in the last days of his life but I believe that wish was denied him as well.”

  “What’s it like to work catastrophically, do you think?”

  “It’s what the nutcases here are trying to do but you would know better than I.”

  “I’ve come across only a few people here. The place seems pretty empty.”

  “On the contrary, it’s teeming. Mother thinks it’s a riot.”

  “Did anyone offer to give you a tour?”

  “We certainly would not subject ourselves to a tour,” Jeffrey said. “We’ve never taken a tour in our lives. But I heard Lola suggest that you give them tours in that colorful vehicle you arrived in.”

  “She hasn’t mentioned it again.”

  “I suppose you would need a script.”

  “I suppose. I don’t know the area, I haven’t explored it much. I haven’t even made a circuit around the lake.”

  “Oh my goodness,” he said. “Everyone does that. I’ve seen dozens do that.”

  “So you’ve walked around the lake?”

  “No,” he said. “That would be quite impossible.” He added, “Mother would never allow it.” He pointed to his shoes which were new, white and vaguely preposterous. “When we first arrived Lola attempted to interest me in the lake after being informed of my interest in maritime law. She calls her Big Girl, you know. And she says the nice thing about Big Girl is that if you concentrate, she eventually notices you. She’s very much sunk into her own thoughts, is Lola’s understanding of the lake, but just possibly, you might be accepted as a figure of interest by Big Girl and in that moment you become real, you can feel yourself being real.”

  “Oh that’s lovely,” Khristen exclaimed. “Lola is so kind.”

  Jeffrey looked at her wanly. “Which is the exact opposite of what occurs when one tries to gain the attention of the Sphinx. I doubt you’ve been to Egypt?”

  “I haven’t been to Egypt.”

  “My grandfather took me there when I was seven. None of this European nonsense—London, Rome, Paris. Those places were of no interest to my tata and therefore to me. We went to see the Sphinx and I had exactly the experience my tata said I would have. The Sphinx does not look at you and you cannot possibly catch its gaze. It looks past, past, past into the distances of eternity. It doesn’t see you. It’s not that you are merely insignificant, you are too transient. Your transience is so great that you do not exist.”

  Ants were crawling over Jeffrey’s magnificent shoes in operatic urgency.

  “Beings such as ourselves could not have created the Sphinx,” he concluded.

  “Jeffrey!” his mother screamed. “Did you put the wafer for the ice machine in your pocket again!”

  “It’s not a wafer, Mother, it’s a token, a counterfeit coin as it were.”

  “Well it’s never where it’s supposed to be!”

  Jeffrey put one hand in his pocket and frowned.

  “Must go,” he said to Khristen.

  * * *

  —

  The next time Khristen entered the office, the rack holding the postcards was gone. As was the bird of paradise. The AVISO buckets were stacked haphazardly in a corner.

  “Would you do me a favor, dear?” Lola asked.

  Would Khristen visit James in Room Thirty-Three and inform him that Frick was dead?

  “Who is Frick?”

  “He experimented on animals, dear, up to the very end of his days. His chain of vivi
section labs was one of the few corporations that survived even this most recent disaster. Injecting drugs, diseases, poisons into animals was his life’s affirming career. Human beings are autonomous, everything else is not, was his belief and it afforded him great latitudes of cruelty.”

  “How was James going to stop him?”

  “Originally he planned on kidnapping him and bringing him back here for reprogramming but the logistics proved impossible. James fancied himself a psychologist though I believe he once worked in some maritime industry. But even if he were a psychologist or there was a psychologist among us here and Frick was convinced to renounce his life in service, a life devoted to shocking, blinding, sickening and maiming thousands of animals, a career built on the countless limbs unnecessarily amputated, the brains ablated, skulls trephined, even if Frick reached the clarity of utterly realizing the wickedness of his generously funded unethical and repetitive experiments and was articulate in expressing his remorse and new awareness, he would no longer be speaking the language of those who had previously understood him. His words would not be understood. And what would the vivisectionist’s transformation of mind accomplish anyway? Where is the gain in the transformation of heart of a single person?

  “James gave up on reprogramming. He worked on the way of balance for a while, the way of peace, but that was a nonstarter. I think he just went back to wanting him dead. Frick being dead doesn’t let either one of them off the hook of course but it might give James some relief. He’s been working on that bastard for ever so long. Now if you find that James is dead himself, which is not unlikely, you just come back and get me. Is this too much to ask?” She seemed to consider this.

  “No, that’s all right,” Khristen said.

  “It might be too much to ask. He’s so old,” Lola added. “He’s on oxygen.”

  Khristen climbed the crumbling staircases. The iron railings were rusted, pitted in parts like lace. Each door had a faint number etched into the wood. She knocked, and after several moments of silence, knocked again.

  The room was painted purple, a softly pulsating purple. There was no furniture, not even a rug on the floor but on one wall dozens of photographs of people were posted, some with X’s inked upon them. They were not unsmiling state-issued IDs but glossy formal portraits.

  “Hello! Mr. James?”

  There was no reply but in the corner furthest from the light that struggled through the dirty window, crouched in a niche like Diogenes in his tub, was a pile of rags, which stirred. Two arms emerged, transparent as the wings of certain insects, then a bearded face.

  “Is he dead?”

  “Lola told me to tell you that Frick is dead,” Khristen reported.

  “It worked!” the wizened creature cried weakly. “Did he suffer terribly?”

  “I don’t think so,” for Lola had told her that he died at his home, age ninety-two, revered by his sons and daughters, his grandsons and granddaughters and generations of students.

  But James was making such a racket lowering himself from his niche, she doubted that he had heard her. He staggered over to the wall of photographs, leaving behind an oxygen tank of bilious green scratched in many places.

  “I feel I’ve turned the corner now! Oh some of the devils have died all right but in their own sweet time.” He had reached the wall and with a filthy finger made a serviceable X across the smiling likeness of a stout man in a tuxedo. “Tell me everything, whoever you are, divine herald. Did he have to be restrained in his agony? Did he scream to dog’s god for mercy? Oh I was feeling the gift with that fucking Frick. I was focused, I was feeding him dread. I attribute it to the purple. I recently repainted the walls, do you see, and I knew the instant I was finished I had him. It was a knife blade of energy that penetrated his filthy heart. It’s a powerful color, perfectly in accord with my purposes. Virgil said it was the color of the soul. Do you know who invented the soul? Pindar. A Greek. Centuries before.”

  Invented, Khristen marveled.

  “See these devils here, see them,” he said, stabbing his finger at another photograph of two men in lab coats, “do you know who they are?”

  “You’ve crossed them out.”

  He pushed a button on the wall and a strong young voice issued forth.

  “Two behavioral scientists who specialized in introducing psychopathology in primates. They began by raising infant monkeys in stainless steel chambers with no contact with any other living thing, thus inducing irreversible mental illness. They’d gotten a few papers out of it. But then they wanted to go beyond raising them with no mothers, they wanted to see what would happen if they provided them with puppet mothers made of hair and cloth, monster mothers who would erratically and without warning eject brass darts or high-pressure compressed air that would blow the infants’ skin practically off their bodies.”

  “When did this happen!” Khristen cried.

  The voice continued. “Then, and they felt this was only logical, they wanted to observe what would occur if the monkeys that survived bore offspring. In accordance with evolving refinements in isolation, one of them devised a rack for impregnation purposes, the ‘rape rack.’ When the infants were born, the mothers, according to the researchers’ reports, attacked them in the most sickening manner, throttling and biting their bodies, crushing their skulls. They found it interesting how the legendary mothering instinct could be so systematically eliminated. They got a few more papers out of this and then retired. Relearning more appropriate behaviors was a project for others to explore.”

  With a broken black fingernail he pushed the button again and the voice ceased.

  “They moved to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and opened a B&B there,” he croaked. “Singing Winds Bed and Breakfast. They devoted themselves to plumping pillows, baking popovers, oiling the fowling guns. They remained impervious to my most concentrated efforts. I projected pain and more pain upon them and all that happened was the further deterioration and decay of my own self. I made myself sick while they enjoyed good health and happiness. They died when their turquoise convertible failed to negotiate a curve. They died instantly, untroubled, untouched by my efforts whereas it took me weeks to leave the experimental chamber in my mind that I’d placed them in.”

  He scratched at the complacent face in Frick’s photograph until a disc of purple wall appeared.

  “Tell me. Details. I see him grotesquely bloated like the dogs he poisoned,” he said faintly.

  He looked at her uneasily. Perhaps she was no divine herald after all, no star-born one, no ethereal being sent to aid him. She was raggedy-looking, sinewy, a shy brown bird, not that that would disqualify her of course, but she might well not be his assuring angel.

  “I used to have the animals on these walls before the walls were purple. The animal subjects. I gazed at them day and night. I tried to inhabit them, heal them, transform them. Evil is not real, it is destructible and can be converted. It is good that it is indestructible. That’s what I sobbed morning and evening but it was all junk. It went out of my heart as junk and it brought back junk. My attempts to engage with their poor tortured selves failed, so I moved on to pictures of their executioners.”

  From the considerable dust wadded against the floorboards, James pulled another photograph and pressed it against the wall. It was a woman surrounded by a group of little girls in Brownie uniforms, an informal shot taken by an undercover operative who had subsequently been arrested. It was the best the poor fellow could do, he could never get near her workplace, he was only able to track her down at a Brownie jamboree where she was volunteering. The Brownies were absolutely clueless as to her profession, the details of which had been scrubbed for their tiny ears. Miss Smith worked with animals, is what those little ears heard. The woman held several doctorates and had been going through her subjects like popcorn for decades. Maybe she was dead now, too, with a memorial plaque and a funded
wing somewhere, no longer briskly crazing capuchin monkeys and severing the spines of hounds.

  He didn’t feel good. He had never felt less well, actually. “When I first got here I felt great despair,” he admitted, “despair and disgust. I longed for confrontation, revenge. Through acts of revenge would come awakening. That was my belief. But my thinking just bounced off their evil like a ball from a wall. And then another deeper comprehension arose. These deliberately poisoned and maimed animals are one with the tortured savior. Both suffer so man can ultimately be saved. And it never ends. But no matter! The tomb is never empty. The tomb is forever full. Immanence is everywhere.”

  She looked so sad, this figure before him, why did she look so sad?

  “It’s been some time since I had a visitor,” he said. “I was beginning to think that everyone had jumped ship, so to speak. Lola lacks managerial ability, she needs more staff.”

  He squinted at her but she didn’t seem to be speaking. Had she been speaking? Even though you are alone in a dark room conduct yourself as though you were facing a noble guest. Naturally easier to do when no one was there. And not to be unkind, but this one appeared to be no noble guest.

  “I kept the photographs of course. I didn’t throw them away.” He rubbed his chest through the worn cloth of his shirt, feeling the plastic bag taped there. Beneath it his skin was inflamed, festering. The animals were here, close to his heart but beyond his or anyone’s ministrations. There was a dog, sitting in a chair, an old office chair with a swivel seat. There was grass beneath the chair and a cement wall with a louvered window behind it, the photograph was gray and white, the dog was spotted. The chair had been rolled out into the yard on its rubber casters. Or perhaps it was always out there. Perhaps this was where they took the pictures before…before what? Their work was done. The subject had been fed drugs to induce cirrhosis of the liver. Human hands held his forelegs extended, keeping the grotesquely bloated body erect. He was thus tall as a child, a child of ten perhaps, a child to whom evil had been incomprehensibly administered by some cruel erlking.