by Joy Williams
“I wouldn’t know how to prepare it,” she said. “I’m not much of a cook.”
“Just like with anything. A little oil. Shallots if you’ve got.”
She saw her bathrobe in his glasses, a wildly cubed and patterned thing. It was as if she were a fly looking at herself.
“What if I offered this whole fish to you for two dollars.”
“Why don’t I give you two dollars and a Coke and you keep it,” Honey said quickly.
He ran his hands through his orange hair, considering.
“You know,” Honey said, “I’m a blood donor. I have an appointment this morning actually to give blood. I should have left already.”
“OK,” he said. “Two Cokes and two bucks.”
In the house she quickly changed into a long skirt, boots and several sweaters. She was very cold. She took two Cokes out of the refrigerator and a ten-dollar bill out of her purse, and hurried back outside.
He was sitting in the cab, looking impatient.
“Here,” she said, “thank you very much.”
He took the offerings and looked at her disdainfully. Water shot from the truck’s bed as he accelerated away.
She was driving to the Bloodmobile in her big gray Cadillac, wondering if she’d locked the house. She’d like to move away now more than ever. Sweet Jesus that fish! but as people always said, Where you gonna go? Every place is like every place else…What was she doing even renting a house anyway? She was a free spirit. When she’d seen that whale on the beach all carved up by drunks and pranksters she thought her life would become different but she’d just become more earthbound and maybe even more susceptible to horrid situations.
She sat mulling at a red light at a gigantic intersection. The light turned green and she floored it, she was so late, it was past actually the…An object smashed into the passenger door of the Cadillac, T-boning the door to a modest degree. The object, a sports car with the vanity plate MUVORER, became airborne, flying like a crumpled Kleenex into a cement utility pole by which it was trephined with glittering efficiency.
Honey was taken to the hospital for observation, though her only apparent injury was a bitten lip. Someone stole her purse as she was assisted into the ambulance but she had scissored her credit cards long before. Honey had never been able to handle the responsibilities of credit. That purse wasn’t going to get anyone anywhere.
The sports car’s driver—blatantly dead—had been the renowned commercial real estate developer Eddie Emerald, driving to close on a refugium of international significance. The elitists and extremists and anti-humanists who thought they’d secured the refugia aspects of the refugiums long ago at considerable cost and compromise found they hadn’t at all. There was a comma in a place where it wasn’t supposed to be. Or it was a comma absent from a place where it was supposed to be. The plans were still fluid as to how the properties would be utilized, but a Supercuts had shown interest in a slice of the site which comprised some stunning acreage.
The environmental community was ecstatic at the news of Eddie’s death. Eddie Emerald gone! Eddie Fucking Emerald offed by a fatty in a Caddy. Honey became as a goddess to them.
At the hospital the decision was made to keep her for observation—a week or two at the most, they said. Something was amiss with her but the doctors couldn’t determine what. She was large, but she didn’t at all look her age, which she reluctantly disclosed. She had always had good skin and being practically gigantic, everyone knew, kept you looking younger longer. You’d ask anybody to guess her age and they’d be off at the very least by ten years unless they sensed a trick and threw out a figure that wasn’t sincere.
It was when she was in the hospital that she discovered the cell in the basement, not a cell naturally with bars and a cold floor but a group of people who considered themselves a Cell. There were never more than half a dozen of them. They sat around a scarred table under bright fluorescent lights and listened to a pleasant voice emitting from a tape recorder. They didn’t believe in reality the way most people believed in it, was the nearest Honey could get to what they believed in. Though “belief” wasn’t even the proper word. When the recording was over, the leader—she guessed he was the leader even if he seemed self-effacing to a fault—made a few comments in a soft voice. Sometimes someone would ask a question, making a stab at clarification, she supposed. Is this the same as this? Or, Don’t you think we ought to…The answer was always no. There was never any wine or cookies or juice. The hour was not at all companionable. Still, the meetings thrilled her in some anxious way though there was very little she could retain from the discussions. Once there was some talk about the Net. The Net holds the person who is asleep by ropes and cords and pulleys and hooks. The Net holds us fast. The Net exists even in the Underworld and the dead regard it with dismay and abhorrence. The subject of the Net was then dropped. Someone quietly remarked that a person who is not horrified by himself knows nothing of himself.
Then the Cell moved elsewhere. The room was taken over evenings by an investment seminar. No one knew where the Cell had gone or under what banner they had managed to obtain the room in the first place as it was primarily reserved for CPR instruction or lactation classes.
Honey was bereft. It was around this time that the environmental groups stopped sending flowers and grateful notes to her room because Eddie Emerald’s widow had gone ahead with the dozing and flattening of the refugium even though her legal right to do so was in doubt. The blading of the site was done the morning the scrappy developer was buried, as a final tribute to him. At the same time the mourners were enjoying post-internment cocktails and munchies at the DoubleTree, the announcement was made to whooping applause that the land was 100-percent leased out, In-N-Out-Burger, an organic farmer’s market and a car and truck detailing station were the last lucky tenants. Eddie Emerald might be gone but so was the pocket wilderness. Honey might even have accelerated its death, some activists groused. Fucking Eddie had been the devil they knew and occasionally he had tossed them a bone. And now he was no more.
The hospital was abruptly eager to discharge her. Whatever Honey had was unusual and fatal but the doctors with their poking and prodding and questioning had gotten pretty much all they could out of her without cutting her open, a suggestion she rejected, she hoped, with grace and good nature. She was susceptible to her lost basement’s Cell’s idea that self-annihilation was necessary for spiritual rebirth but she didn’t think that consigning herself into the curious hands of surgeons at this undistinguished institution was what they meant.
The nurses said goodbye, gave her the usual—the plastic pan, the bath wipes, the Sure-Grip socks, the tube of moisturizing lotion, the complimentary magazine.
“It might take you a little longer than you’d think to read these articles,” a nurse suggested. “Your comprehension might be down a bit.”
While she was waiting for a wheelchair to remove her she read about a seven-year-old who got fourteen years in the slammer for environmental activism. If she’d had even one milk tooth left in her head she wouldn’t have fallen under the terrorism enhancement sentencing guidelines but she didn’t so she had. The child’s name wasn’t being released because of her age but the journalist did provide the detail that she was no higher than a tabletop which meant that she couldn’t even attend a carnival ride unattended. But what had the poor kid done anyway? Honey couldn’t seem to extract this information from the article. “Punishing crimes in the name of the environment is our highest priority,” the successful prosecutor was quoted as saying.
The phrasing seemed wily in the extreme, but Honey feared the nurse might have a point. Her comprehension had begun to fray.
A bill was presented and at last a wheelchair was provided. In it she was pushed to the curb. She owed the place over three hundred thousand dollars which she naturally lacked the means to pay. They assured her they would hound
her to the ends of the earth and beyond if necessary to collect these funds.
She had lingered outside the hospital’s doors for some time. It was eerily silent and the air smelled sharp and acrid. Nothing was particularly recognizable to her, nothing seemed suited to her nature. She walked a few yards and it became dark quickly. Then it was day again and she was cooling her swollen feet in the tepid waters of a sorry-looking lake. Yellow scum tickled her ankles. It felt nice though, no doubt about that. Her poor feet blessed her for her presence of mind in an untenable situation. The people here weren’t as intriguing as those in the Cell but they weren’t all that different from them either. They didn’t seem to be in full possession of their faculties but who was these days? She sometimes entertained the thought she’d died in her dear old Caddy and that this was death. But if that were the situation then everyone here would have to be dead as well which was possible if unlikely, even that new girl who’d shown up who seemed so familiar but who was not. And if that were the situation why were there so few of them and why were the demands being made upon them so futile given their condition? The world seemed to be proceeding as it always had, it hadn’t ended after all, which was strange too.
She’d been so discouraged once, so discouraged, and even this place could make her blue. For example, the story about the whale, the story that meant so much to her, had scarcely been acknowledged, and she was sure she hadn’t mentioned it before, which would have been tiresome she guessed.
She tried to settle down and enjoy the night which enveloped her not that comfortably, though she preferred it to the days, which mostly had a rubbery, unforgiving texture. This place was outside the perimeter of death, she assured herself. Or was it parameter she wondered…
* * *
—
The next morning it was determined that Foxy had gone but Scarlett was still in residence.
“Please go and coax her out,” Lola begged Khristen. “Tell her Gordon has arranged for a car and driver.”
Scarlett was not at all pleased to see Khristen.
“Do you want me to call an ambulance?” Khristen asked.
“The ambulance doesn’t come out here, girl, don’t you know a thing! What’s the matter with you! Who are you anyway!”
She was complaining about this pain, this new pain, way down…“It’s like I want to take a dump but I can’t. Is that kidney stones? Gallbladder?”
“Your suit’s all ready to go. Why, you’re even wearing it!” Khristen exclaimed. “And I’ve just been informed that Gordon has arranged for a car and driver.”
“I bet he has,” Scarlett said crossly. “Those two love to arrange for a car and driver.”
She’d been given eight months to live and was coming up on the end of it. Initially she’d been quite excited about her role in this lunatic venture.
“Your mission might make a difference,” Khristen said. “Insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, there are no restrictions on their use whatever. This might make people question…”
“You can’t stop the bastards. I’d just be offing an underling or two. It wouldn’t affect the corporate level at all. I must say though that meeting last night was almost enough to push me out the door.”
“What happened to Foxy?”
“Who knows. She’s a bit weird, don’t you think? All she wants to do is repent which quite narrows her potential.”
“She seemed pretty determined.”
“Oh she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. But the rest of them—they have no more sense than a Pluto Platter.”
“What’s that?”
“A Pluto Platter?”
“Yes.”
“Well it started out as a pot lid I believe. For a popcorn pot. But the concept became plastic. You sail it through the air. But it doesn’t return to you, that’s something else.” She looked at Khristen and emitted a burp.
“Did you have a favorite part of being here?” Khristen asked. “You’ve been here for a while now.”
“I guess my favorite part was thinking of the people who knew me back when, if they were still around, saying ‘Why, we didn’t know her at all! Who knew she was capable of murder. And on behalf of the earth at that!’ ” Scarlett gently kneaded her stomach, “That gave me a good feeling, thinking that.”
“Well they can say those things for real now. Lola said you had a lot of scatter pins. Do you want to be wearing all your scatter pins?”
“For real!” Scarlett mocked. There were scatter pins, she supposed, but she preferred to think of them as medals. She would be a general, terribly attractive, marching into battle with all that sauce or salad or whatever they called it on her chest…But that came later. You didn’t wear them during the actual battle. That would be in poor taste. “I’m not going to do it,” she announced. “I want to be remembered as a respectable person. I don’t want to do anything wrong.”
“Do you ever think we’re here because we did something wrong already?”
“You are so exasperating. I want to tell you something. I believe I’m hungry! I haven’t had an appetite for ever so long and now I want a cucumber sandwich. Would you be so kind as to get me one?”
“What about the statement you wrote?”
“Give it to the next one.”
“But it’s yours. You put a lot of thought into it.”
“Who’s next in the pipeline? They can use it. I think that maybe one of the problems was that the filet knife is just too intimate and I’ve seen these young men in photographs and they’re unexceptional in every way. Selling poison is their job. I’m sure they don’t think it’s anything to get stuck in the ribs for.”
A bit of color had crept into Scarlett’s old cheeks.
“You look as though you signed a new lease on life,” Khristen said.
“I don’t believe you sign it, you get…”
“There is no lease, it’s imaginary,” Khristen said.
Scarlett gazed at her coldly.
“Lola says personal existence vanishes unless it is stabilized and consolidated in radical and sustained acts of choice,” Khristen said.
“I know she says that! Don’t I know she drums that into us! But like most of what Lola says, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Personal existence departs a person regardless. Lola’s just trying to stir things up, you know. Before this notion she had the Hemlock Society out here but that wasn’t lively enough for her, oh no. She had the same problem with them. When it came time, people backed off. You could wheedle them ragged, it wouldn’t convince them, not usually. Lola took the Hemlock idea, a Mr. Derek Humphry’s idea by way of Socrates, and gave it a twist is all, a very naughty twist. She’s practically a plagiarist…” She looked at Khristen suspiciously. “Did you know my Fred?”
Khirsten shook her head.
“I had so many dreams last night and he was in every one of them. I was outside this fine old house Fred and I had lived in, looking at it, a wonderful house, beautiful wood throughout, those darling thumb-latch doors, the kind of ceilings those atheist architects call cathedral, four fireplaces, a slate roof, gardens and orchards, a gazebo…”
Surely the woman was exaggerating, Khristen thought.
“…and there was Fred, hustling toward it while I watched and I called out to him, ‘We don’t live there anymore, it’s not even there, it’s a Walgreens,’ and he said, ‘That doesn’t matter to me now.’ They tore that beautiful old house down and it wasn’t even on a corner. Walgreens made it all a corner. Hundreds of people materialize in the aisles hourly, tramping around, buying cheap cheese and batteries, sticking their arms in those blood pressure sleeves. Don’t you tell me there’s any sacredness to places.”
“I won’t,” Khristen said.
“All last night it was Fred, Fred, Fred. I recall a week to the day before he went, he said, ‘I want a copy of Boat
ing World Magazine,’ and so I went to the newsstand and got him a copy of Boating World Magazine. Then the day before he went, he said, ‘I want a year’s subscription to Boating World Magazine,’ and everyone could tell he wouldn’t be seeing next Tuesday and I said, ‘Fred, don’t you be childish. You know that’s twelve issues, arriving singly over the course of a year, a whole year,’ I said. I feel bad about that, my reaction. It wouldn’t have killed me to have gotten the poor man a subscription, picked up the phone, made a big show out of getting him a good faith subscription.”
“You should feel bad about that,” Khristen said.
“Are you going to get that cucumber sandwich or not,” Scarlett demanded. “Very little mayonnaise.” She dismissed the exasperating presence from her mind and smoothed the sleeves of her suit. The skin of her hands was like crepe. What had she been meant for? Surely she was not meant to become the agent in the murders of some pesticide representatives. She was no anarchist and what was demeaning about that? She wasn’t a transgressor. Break what must be broken. Yes. Perhaps. But she was not a breaker. Besides, there were hundreds of young fellows working for pesticide companies and worse with families to support. Why didn’t Lola aim for the people at the top, the ones least indirectly responsible? Because she abhorred research was why. She didn’t want to do the research required to find the individual solely accountable. Her organization could use an overhaul. It was nothing but a grubby little suicide academy.
She pictured one of the fools whose life she had spared. He wore a wedding ring. He would be going home tonight to some ghastly little family—them—instead of lying in a public atrium by a smelly water fountain not responding to resuscitation efforts. The more she thought about him the more resentful she became. She didn’t want to be responsible for having preserved another’s future. If she were that sort of person she would have stuck with the little girl from the Dominican Republic she and Fred had adopted, Natalie Ann. She lived with them for nine years and she was all right, not exactly what you’d call a joy to be around but a good little girl by and large, no trouble at all really; then she hit puberty and began to masculinize, started turning into a boy that can’t be a boy without a great deal of financial investment. Scarlett found this disconcerting. You couldn’t even come out of a movie theater with her without someone yelling across the parking lot Hey blackhead are you a boy or a girl: Scarlett just didn’t feel up to the challenge. She and Fred went back to the agency and were told that this was unexceptional, in fact it was exceptionally common, it had something to do with the Dominican Republic. Didn’t nobody tell you? they said. It’s against the rules not to tell…Fred didn’t want to give the child up but Scarlett had said Natalie Ann will be the death of me!! Fred hadn’t much spine to him but he wasn’t lazy either. If you could get him going, he’d accomplish what was necessary. He determined that men from the Dominican Republic usually get themselves employed as duct cleaners and the like and Fred contacted a duct cleaning business and set up an appointment. The workers agreed to take the child for inclusion in their families in exchange for a Chevy Silverado with a tow package and no more than forty thousand miles on the engine. Following the removal of Natalie Ann they had one of their own—so strange because they thought they couldn’t—a boy, the one who made a living selling sperm, of all things. The years hurtled by. Fred was an actuary, she believed that’s what he’d been, and she taught second graders for a while, though only as a sub, always a sub. There was a game they played. Once I was a…and now I am a…How they loved that game, the little ones. Once I was a crayon but now I am six o’clock at night.