by Joy Williams
Had she left? She was so quiet. No. She was extending her hand to his, patting his lightly. He recoiled.
“Wonder, the seed of knowledge. You shock it and see…You kill it and see…” he muttered. “It never ends.”
Was that the door stumbling shut once more? Someone had been there certainly. But now, no.
He turned to his niche. He was weary, he was done. He caressed the old green tank. It was filled with helium, for a moment just like this one, for once effort ceases in life, the movement is downward. This has been known since remote times.
Lola thought it was oxygen, something to keep him going, keep him enlisted, but she didn’t know! Nor would the body know. To the body, helium was perfectly fine, one breath as good as another. The brain was already in on the game, the heart the last to know, poor heart.
He pulled the scuffed, cool tank closer and straightened its waxy tubes. It was the same color as his old thermos on the trawler. Sometimes it held coffee, but mostly whiskey. It kept him going, and for many years what a gay science it had been, the work he’d done, scouring the seabed clean, sucking the eminence from those proud depths.
Hard work but they had done it. It had taken years, but he and his crew had done it.
He tore the bag of pictures from his chest and patted it for a moment, then clipped the tubes to his dry nostrils, twisted a dial and pulled the bag over his head. It smelled of dust and his own long stink. Thoughts moved slowly through his head like a procession of starving animals. They seemed to be taking the place of his breaths. But the animals disappeared one by one, and then the procession ended.
* * *
—
No one had ever popped off on the grounds of the Institute before, it was deeply unprecedented. Lola didn’t even know how to dispose of the body. She liked the tradition of the dakhma—the Towers of Silence—but there weren’t any vultures anymore. It was the vultures that were essential to the Towers of Silence. But James weighed no more than an armful of twigs which the remains indeed resembled. Whatever problem inherent in their further disintegration would resolve itself.
Now Lola and Khristen were painting the walls of his old room with tubs of gray, of which there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply.
“He had no business slapping on that lurid color,” Lola complained. “Where on earth did he find such a purple? He was probably trying to pattern himself on the desert fathers but went off course. Not that they were actual fathers, they were all sterile as mules, but they’d go into the desert as solitaries and grapple with the devil. Some contend that they saved civilization which had been pretty much reduced to empty ceremony, execution and bell ringing at a very crucial time.
“Civilization,” Khristen said thoughtfully.
“They saved it by denying it with vicious certitude,” Lola said. “But my point is that they wrestled with the devil. There were no lavender walls and oxygen provided, that’s for sure.”
Khristen tried to picture the desert fathers. They were toothless and glorious, lunging through black sands, preaching to the dung beetles and confronting the devil whenever feasible. When they died, lions, weeping, dug the graves with their great claws.
“When they were grappling with the devil were they wrestling with evil? Is it the same thing?”
“No! That’s the mistake that was made from the get-go. Those two are only distantly related. You can beat the devil and not hobble evil one bit. We’ve locked up the devil with his mirrors and peacocks and let the real felon free. The devil’s nothing more than evil’s colorful distraction, his myth, his clown. Evil made the devil just like God made little Jesus and for the same incomprehensible ends.”
Khristen looked at the paint congealing in the bristles of the brush. The brush wasn’t working right. She lay it down on a piece of newspaper, an obituary page, and had a stinging recollection of her father’s funeral day, when she’d been commanded to imagine the dead child’s future.
Lola extended a paint-gummed finger toward a stripling’s goofy stance. He was wearing a bola tie.
“That one died during the bad hamburger epidemic. This paper is so old. Of course they don’t publish anymore. People don’t bother with obituaries. They’re a thing of the past.”
“Bad hamburger,” Khristen said. It sounded like a pet being scolded.
“It was at one of those big Harvest Festivals. Many sickened, some succumbed. It turned out—well this was only one of the facts disclosed—that a single patty, they call them patties for some reason, can contain the flesh of a hundred animals. This disturbed some people. They wanted their food to be more singular.”
“I’m supposed to know what happens when you die,” Khristen said. “I was told so.”
“You’re still worrying that little baby-step death of yours! Well you shouldn’t. You can’t rely on your own experience in that instance. It’s just a theory. The Hindus have an elaborate theory for example. With the Hindus when you die you leave Hinduland and go to heaven. You find that all your enemies are there whereas all your loved ones are in hell. This is not as terrible as it appears to be for all you have to do is have the wit to say, ‘Why I prefer to stay in the blackness and horror of hell with my dear ones for where they are is heaven to me,’ and immediately both heaven and hell vanish. All appearances vanish. You pass beyond them. And you’re in a perfect state of being where there’s nothing that’s not its exact opposite. I forget the name they give it. It’s supposed to be wonderful. You’re supposed to achieve this before you die, though definitely your last chance is right after, immediately after.”
“You just say ‘I want to stay with my loved ones’ and they vanish, too, along with the blackness and the horror?” Khristen said doubtfully.
“It’s not anything you could possibly want which is possibly the point of it.”
“What happens if you don’t think to say it?”
“Think to say what, dear?”
“If you figure that’s the way it’s going to be and always was—that you end up in heaven with your enemies or in hell with those you loved?”
“Oh!” Lola said. “Then you’re just stuck until the next time around. That is not supposed to be desirable. Now don’t hide that brush away so I’ll think I’ve misplaced it,” and she began gathering up the rags and paints and papers. “That gray covered better than I expected. It’s a most forgiving color. Are you feeling all right, dear? We’ve probably been in this stuffy space too long. When we’re done, which I declare we are, I’m not going to utilize this room again. I’ll put a padlock on the door big as a horse’s eye. One of my very good friends—oh this was long ago—opined that eternity was a forgotten horse. I liked that so much that I wanted to think eternity was a forgotten horse, too, but she said that wasn’t fair. I’ve never been able to come up with anything half that good.”
“So lonely,” Khristen said. She did not like the image of eternity being a forgotten horse.
“Lonely’s the name of the game, my dear. I’m going over to the motel now with some supplies. Would you care to accompany me? I’ve never seen anybody go through glasses the way Barbara does. I think she forgets where she put them.”
Together they descended the sagging steps. From the office Lola retrieved a box in which there were several clean and similar glasses, though they were more like jars.
Jeffrey was standing on the sodden lawn with a large book in his hands.
“…strict construction, textualism, living constitutionalism…” He looked up at them, blinking.
“How is your mother? What’s she doing today?” Lola inquired.
“Resting,” Jeffrey said, returning to the tome. “…original intent can also be a building block of any interpretative theory…” He raised one small hand dramatically, forestalling interruption. “…though of course one must also address ambiguity and textual silence.”
&nb
sp; “I’ll just put the glasses she requested down here,” Lola said.
Back in the office which offered its usual powerful bouquet of mildew, Khristen said, “Do you think people write books to create havoc or for some other reason?”
Lola dismissed this query about an author’s intentions as all but unanswerable.
They stood in silence for a time. Nothing stirred.
“I miss the animals,” Khristen said.
“Ah yes, people always seemed to resent them so.”
“I used to think that animals could be immortal because they were innocent of death.”
“Whoever told you that!” Lola exclaimed. “That’s a doozy. There’s nothing that ignorant.”
“They’re immortal and that’s why they don’t live with us anymore. It was something, given the circumstances, I figured out for myself. But I was very little then, young.”
“That’s a different matter then,” Lola relented. “A lovely thought,” she conceded. “Much nicer than that fellow around Darwin’s time—can’t remember his name—a respected scientist, a vulcanologist he was, and his belief was that animals become extinct because God stops thinking about them. You would think people would find the notion quite alarming but it found favor in many circles. It’s actually back in fashion again.”
Khristen looked uncertainly about the office which seemed even more cramped with nothing in it but the AVISO buckets and a rusting multidrawer filing cabinet.
“Where is your plant?” she asked.
“I stopped thinking about it,” Lola said. “Haha! Oh, I’m sorry, dear. Forgive me. Everything has become so…unwieldy. Would you do me another favor, dear? Would you help me a bit with Scarlett? She’s delaying her exit again. Perhaps you could try and re-enthuse her about her project.”
“What is her project?”
“The plan was to wipe out a number of people in agriculture but this was supposed to happen months ago.”
“Agriculture.”
“The term’s become meaningless, now more than ever. But this is what delay, endless delay has reduced the Institute to. Our people have to start leaving in an orderly fashion.” She dug about in one of the stomachs of the file cabinet. “Here’s her manifesto, quite lengthy I’m afraid.” She handed Khristen a sheaf of papers covered in thin meandering lines. It resembled the excreta of some insect.
“I don’t know if I can decipher this,” Khristen said.
“It makes little difference. It was never particularly inspirational but she’s been stalling so long it’s just become a garrulous and utterly useless call to fight a battle which long ago was lost. I’ll attempt to summarize.”
The words aridity, desertification, infestation, eradication, degradation, salinization and urbanization occurred frequently. Decreased resilience of the earth and her waters, vanishing resilience of the earth and her waters, vanished resilience of the earth and her waters—the text did possess a certain acceleration though. Biodiversity collapse was a phrase whose horror did not accrete with repetition. An attempt was made in the closing pages to achieve a compelling narrative with an avenger in a stylish red suit becoming prominent.
“What is this red suit?”
“Oh that preposterous suit!” Lola said. “Don’t bother visiting with her now. I’ll call a meeting for tonight, an emergency meeting of reassessment. You’ll meet everyone at last. Sundown sharp. We used to gather at the boathouse but it’s too depressing there. We meet in Laundery.”
* * *
—
Laundery had been inked in scrupulous error above the rotting lintel. There were no machines in Laundery or even tubs and faucets, just broken pipes and filthy drains. The members of Lola’s shabby colony sat on tables where others once had folded clean clothes. You could never have sat on one of those tables then. It was forbidden. Several sofas that appeared to be leather and dyed a carefree pink slumped against one wall but no one had chosen to occupy them.
A man in a dirty chorister robe touched Khristen’s elbow. “Rhinoceros,” he said quietly, gesturing toward the sofas, “mother and childs. We try to respect them.”
A small bent figure in a shrunken red suit glared at Khristen. She was leaning against a large soft woman who looked like an enormous doll.
“How old are you?” the doll asked Khristen in a pleasant fashion. When she replied, the little person beside her muttered, “She’s deluded.”
“Don’t be mean, Scarlett,” the doll said.
There was an odd little dais in one of Laundery’s fetid corners and it was upon this that Lola stood beside a skeletal man with a raw and ravaged face.
“Gordon is back with us,” Lola said happily, her hand on the man’s arm. “I never dared hope this would happen. No applause please.”
“What happened to you, Gordon?” the chorister asked. “You look dreadful. Your skin. Your whole head even.”
“Later,” Gordon commanded.
Lola called out names for attendance purposes. This sometimes elicited muttered assent and sometimes not. “Foxy, Hector, Grayson, Scarlett, Honey, Tom…Are there others?”
“It’s kind of like church a little,” Honey, the enormous woman, whispered to Khristen.
Lola announced James’s demise. There was some difficulty among the group in remembering him. They were more reminiscent about his last subject of interest.
“I saw Frick at a Chamber of Commerce meeting once,” someone said. “Merry old bastard. Life of the party.”
Lola then introduced Khristen.
“Is she a guest?” a voice inquired.
“A visitor.”
“I didn’t think we accepted guests.”
“No one’s a guest here was my understanding. No visitors. No observers.”
“Do you have a diagnosis at least?”
Gordon cut in impatiently. “We all have a duty here. What will you be doing to further our agenda, Khristen? Maybe you should kill all the poets. Is that something you’d be good to do?”
Khristen said nothing. It would be preposterous to express alarm of course.
“Now don’t tease,” Lola said.
“I’m not teasing. Killing all the poets has been a consideration for some time. They’re so repulsively, tremulously anthropocentric.”
“It’s a fine idea,” Honey said. “It’s like…imaginative. It would require a person of considerable integrity to kill a poet.”
“All the poets,” Gordon corrected.
“But they don’t congregate as a rule,” someone said.
“Of course they congregate. There are workshops, fairs…slams…” he said distastefully.
“But what about the ones who hate and despise the world we’ve made,” a deeply wrinkled person of girlish deportment said. “The ones who detest our ruined surroundings and the hopes and desires of those people with whom they are forced to exist? Who write unsentimentally with cold disgust…”
“Who are you again?” Gordon demanded.
“Foxy,” Foxy said.
“You’re so nineteenth century,” Gordon said. “In no other age was there so much pious revulsion with the times. But even then, artists were useless. They accomplished nothing.”
“Angry poets are OK, though, aren’t they?” Foxy said worriedly.
Gordon sighed and his ravaged skin whistled unbecomingly. An insect bumbled against his bare arm and was snared by putrid corrugations. His exposed skin was like a Venus flytrap. He took a yellowed rag from his pocket and daubed at it. The struggling bug sunk deeper.
“You are our drug addict, is that right?” Gordon asked, seemingly having lost interest in the fate of poets. He had an unsettling voice, high-pitched and childish, quite compelling. The voices of oracles were said to be always those of children, possibly because a child can see everything in nothing whereas an adul
t has just the opposite inclination.
“I am,” Foxy said, “I was the Queen of Rehabs. The younger generation is always trying to better me, but I consider my position unassailable. My favorite place was in North Dakota. Where they fucked over all the Indians? Or was that Oklahoma? I was there, too, I think. Anyway, they give you a hundred and fifty herbs ground up in this big disgusting shake and then you take a sauna after which you lie down in the snow and then you kneel at this communal trough with all the other junkies and puke your guts out. The next day same thing. Two weeks of this. I’ve probably told you about this before because, as process, it was my favorite.”
The congregation was mute.
“You might be thinking I should target the pharmaceutical companies,” she went on, “but I’ve understandably got a soft spot in my heart for them. Or I could target junkies, because they’re so annoying. Why do they get to bliss out in these the most dreadful of times? But I’ve decided on the United States Navy instead. The annihilation of the United States Navy.”
“Very good,” Gordon said. “The navy has perfected their new sonar system so it always runs at maximum capability. It causes the cortex of whales and dolphins to slough off into something like cooked spaghetti. Reluctantly they have agreed to limit its peacetime use.”
“Peacetime? What do they mean?” the chorister asked.
“They insist that it’s essential to track submarines and is now an integral and permanent part of our defense arsenal.”
“Submarines? Is anybody still making submarines?”
“I saw a whale once long ago,” Honey the great doll-like woman said. “It was during a sleet storm and my girlfriend had just beaten me up again. For the last time, I told her—this is the last time you beat up on Honey and her heart of gold—and I meant it and I was sitting in my car drinking a little wine and listening to the radio and the radio was talking about a whale that had washed up on the beach that morning near the boardwalk, by the carousels, and I said to myself, ‘I’m going to see that whale,’ so I drove there. It was after midnight and no one was around because it wasn’t sleeting anymore but it was cold and I found the whale. She was beautifully curved and glistening on the sand, like pewter, like the pewter plates my grandma used to collect. It was dark but the darkness made her body bright. Parties unknown had carved their initials deep into her sides. I stood there for the longest time in the dark. And I just wanted to kill those parties unknown. I wanted to kill them.”