by Joy Williams
She couldn’t remember who she’d been anymore.
Fred had wanted until we meet again on his tombstone.
She had said, Fred, will you never stop torturing me. You’re going to be the death of me, Fred.
At the end when you’re old and bedridden you should just want to be quiet but Fred hadn’t been quiet. They’d had to give him morphine, he was so upset. They call you once they give them the morphine.
She would have to turn the light on soon if she were to see anything. Another day gone. What was it she was waiting for?
The sandwich.
That girl would never bring it. That girl had forgotten all about it and her, too, just because she hadn’t shivved a fellow indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of butterflies. Or was it millions? Lola needed an accountant. She was so vague with figures. And had it even been butterflies at all, or those other things? Chry…chry…the cocoon things. The ones that slept and turned into, slept and turned into…something else.
She was wanting something still, even if she couldn’t remember it. They’d better not count her out yet.
She began to fuss with the light. The day had become a little dim. The lamp was supposed to have three degrees of brightness—it had one of those fancy bulbs. But you can’t put one of those fancy bulbs into an inferior socket, well not inferior exactly but one that’s just not set up right…
* * *
—
In the distance something leapt about in the sky like lightning. Khristen was making her circuit around the lake. Pronounced. The word appeared in her mind as though upon the path. Like a great wilted flower. Pronounced. It was a word they used before the dead in that instant when everything was altered. She pushed past it, its petaled softness. Several trails branched away from the muddy path that encircled Big Girl in morose embrace. She turned onto the one that led to the motel.
Jeffrey was seated under a rotting awning wearing a suit and tie.
“You’re wearing a suit and tie,” she noted.
“You don’t know how to speak with me yet, do you,” he said.
“Are you leaving?”
“Oh you’ll know when I leave.” He looked past her in proud disguise.
“Will you be telling me then?”
“I have no idea when I’ll be leaving!” He pointed toward his mother, prone, flawlessly bronzed in a black swimsuit, a red and white cooler by her side. “It’s all up to her. And she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything. It’s her drinking. But if she stopped drinking this very night she would not recognize me tomorrow.”
“Who would she see instead?”
“No idea.” He removed his tie. It was patterned with small oars. “King or courier, you know that game, don’t you? It’s a children’s game. Who would you rather be?”
“The king’s friend.”
“You’re so sincere,” he said glumly. “But I don’t find sincerity intolerable like many people do. I’m quite tolerant though it may not seem so, it may not appear that I’m at all tolerant but Mother has put me in some very uncomfortable situations and I’ve had to make the best of them.”
He removed his black suit jacket, then pulled his shirt over his head. His skin was white as an infant’s tooth and he appeared quite emaciated. No one seemed driven to partake of nourishment here. The snack machines gleaming in dark alcoves were empty and unplugged. He replaced the shirt over his head, though backward.
“We’re passing through, just passing through. Isn’t that what they say?”
“I guess some people say it.”
“Though for the moment you’re not passing through at all. You’re over there, associating with those alarmingly misinformed people and I’m confined here to Unit One. Grebe. All the rooms are named after birds that lived here once, not in the motel of course. Grebes are diving birds. Unassuming little things.”
“Are the rooms different inside?” She pictured carefully inscribed murals, trompe l’oeil floors, distinctive dioramas, nests of varying commitment and design.
“One would think, but I doubt it. Decor is so seldom edifying. I no longer find life to be as edifying as I once did. You could argue that it was misrepresented to me because of my youth. I had my tata and my law library. I was not afraid of the dentist, I…” He looked with sudden alarm at the empty swimming pool. “Where is my swan?” After a moment of study, he said, “Well, it’s gone.”
“The wind perhaps,” Khristen suggested.
“I believe you were told I was at the dentist. Well, I was not,” he said.
They were silent. She thought of chapel, back at her school’s monthly Taizé service when someone would forget to tap the chime, probably deliberately, and you would wait and wait on your knees until one of the smaller kids would begin to cry.
“Grebe,” he said at last. “That is a gesture only.”
“Yes,” she said. “Someone’s gesture.”
“The real work will begin when we’re gone from here. Even for you. Mother says you think you’ve already died. That’s why you give her the creeps.”
“Some time ago, I was told that. By my mother actually.”
“They always want something more from us, don’t they. They’re never satisfied. They believe in progress through the generations. Super abilities and such. Increased comprehension. I will never have issue. The line will stop with me.”
It was not difficult to believe this.
“Did you see runners on your way here. People running?”
“No runners,” Khristen said.
“You came from a different direction. We saw so many! And giant billboards everywhere! run for babies. The billboards depicted a large hand and in this hand was a tiny human creature. run for babies mile after mile, but Mother was driving at such a high rate of speed it was some time before I noticed that the date for the marathon was incorrect. All those people were running for something else. Mother just raced right through them. She might even have struck several.”
The wind rose, searching the sky for something to engage, then finding nothing, dropped down to nudge the water in the pool.
“Do you know that doves can fly several hundred miles a day?”
“I did not,” Khristen said.
“But they usually didn’t. Now they don’t at all.”
Barbara stirred on the chaise lounge and sat upright. She gazed at them saying nothing for a moment then said, “Oh my God.” She rooted around in the cooler. “Darling,” she said to Jeffrey, “would you bring me one of those jars from the refrigerator, one of those quart jars? How many are left, have you noticed?”
“Five,” he said.
“Oh my God! No, forget it, darling. Mustn’t make you my Ganymede.” She stood and entered Grebe. “God, only five.”
“She’s not seeing you anymore,” Jeffrey noted. “She can’t focus on reversals. I suppose that’s for the best. She revels in distress but it’s not good for her. She could have a cerebral hemorrhage or something,” he said thoughtfully. “Of course I’m no doctor. But you’re no housekeeper either.”
“It was suggested,” she said, startled. “But…”
“Though we could use some towels…Just kidding!” he crowed, jumping up and down in the most awkward fashion. “I was immersing myself in maritime law this morning and that always makes me a little silly afterward. But that awful little woman in the Santy Claus suit…you were supposed to bring her something, a sandwich I believe.”
“Oh, I was! A cucumber sandwich. I forgot. She must be—”
“Don’t concern yourself about it. The sandwich could not possibly have been provided.”
“Perhaps she decided to set off after all, and she only wanted me to leave her alone. I don’t even know where the bread is kept,” Khristen worried. “I could never have come back with a sandwich. I hope
I didn’t promise her I would.”
The wind glided away from the pool, pushing at a bit of refuse as a dog might with his nose, considering its worth.
“This operation is clearly winding down, what’s puzzling is that you’ve arrived for it,” Jeffrey mused. “We could hear your voices the other night, voices carry you know. Mother thought it was a hoot. She finds the provincial hilarious.”
“It was a meeting,” Khristen said. “Someone who had left and was not expected back returned.”
“We determined that more or less from the babble. The one who returned sounds positively frightful.”
“He spoke about the condition of the world we’d known. There’s been quite a lot of renewal, he said—that is, much that brought about so much destruction has been restored.”
“Oh look!” Jeffrey exclaimed. “A backgammon board.” He prodded at something in the ground. “But only half of it.”
“The people present thought there was still time for them to sacrifice themselves for a better purpose but apparently there is not.”
“Oldest game in recorded history,” Jeffrey noted. He looked at Khristen. “I am very impressed by the use of the word renewal. Excellent employment of judicial review.”
“I find words are becoming more and more treacherous,” she admitted.
“Never trust them, my tata says. Bend them to your will.”
She had traveled here through a riven world but she remembered even then seeing, on the distant mountains shorn of any green, the machines and cables spanning them, tiny as toys and slim as strings, and figures trembling and shifting there with tireless purpose as though the intention was to raise the dead peaks for the sole purpose of burying them again.
“Other than the runners, what did you see before you arrived?” she asked Jeffrey. For she felt as uncertain about visions as the words that accompanied them.
“Food trucks and armament. A great deal of armament. My tata says it’s because they gave a tax break to households with guns. Now no one pays taxes because everyone has guns.” He gave a short bark of amusement. “No provisions have been made for consequences.”
Armament and food trucks. It had been a bit of a blur coming here. Tongue tacos had been heavily advertised. The tongues of angels could possibly be provided if one knew the right contacts. Variety was in more demand than ever.
“Would you be able to tell me…” she began.
“I’m a child,” he said reasonably. “I’m but ten.” He put his jacket back on and buttoned it.
“Yes,” Khristen said. “I was at your birthday party. At the bowling alley.”
He was about to tease her and reply that his birthday event, which she had attended, true, was certainly not at a bowling alley—surely she must have suspected that—but she was so easily troubled he decided not to.
“Strikes and spares,” he said. “Awful racket. All quite meaningless.”
“I wonder if it’s still there.”
“Of course it isn’t there, still or not! And those sentimental chimps of Lola’s aren’t there. We’re all being fed the most awful drivel. We’re consuming nothing but lies.”
The frolic he always briefly felt after momentarily quitting the rigors of maritime law was fading and he felt desperate to return to his books—the ponderous certainties of text and the resisting ineffable sea.
They both stared at the pool, mindful again of the absent swan. He felt cross. It had been a wobbling luffing heap of profoundly indestructible plastic. It couldn’t possibly have disappeared.
* * *
—
Tom paced by a cracked fish tank. It held a cheesy chipped grotto and a toppled Neptune—formerly reckoned as one of the great gods, ruler of the deep, lord of both salt water and fresh—astraddle a dented can of energy drink.
This was not what Lola commanded as her office but another lobby-like space in the once grand structure. The hotel complex had once been enormous with every amenity. There’d even been plans in its heyday to enclose the whole enchilada in a polymer bubble like the ski slopes in Dubai. It had a bunker-like feel to it now, a last station feel.
For years, Tom had worked with germs. Tularemia, Q fever, brucellosis, glanders, plague…but he was never a natural like his father. His father had been one of the first germ warriors, one of the best. He and his team had developed the incapacitants for an assault on Cuba. Debilitate for a few hours, incapacitate for a few weeks. The entire island would go down in a benign biological assault enabling conventionally armed troops to go in without casualties. It was beautifully nuanced. A few hundred Cubans might die, maybe a thousand, but they would have been those with prior health issues. Statistically they were irrelevant.
His father had not been bitter about the failure to implement. “They ask you to solve a problem and you do and that’s when the quibbling begins. It’ll always be that way,” he said. “Don’t let them sweet-talk you into defense. Insist on offense. Defense is more complicated and never as satisfying. It takes ten months to develop a weapons-grade agent and ten more years to develop a vaccine against it.”
The project Tom devoted himself to was called Aeolus. His wife often teased him about the real Aeolus who had six sons and six daughters all living together on a precipitous isle. Caroline hoped for six and six. She was not about to let her husband’s occupation sour her on the future. But she bore no babies, it was cancer that found her to be a fruitful host. Throughout her long decline he continued with his work. He traveled to Russia for brief but frequent periods, working with researchers there. But he was becoming uneasily unprofessional. The smell of bleach and straw and animal agony, the broken vivariums, the stalls and cages, the posts with tethering rings on the dried seabeds. His colleagues assured him that the most exciting discoveries all lay ahead. The rescripting of human metabolism was in its infancy, the manipulation of immune systems had just begun. It was the purity of possibility that made his bug and gas colleagues blue-sky optimists. Germs could be designed not only to kill but to manage all of life’s processes—cognition, development, reproduction, everything. If there was anyone out there who still thought they knew what it meant to be human, their world was about to change.
At some point the project’s name was changed from Aeolus to Renaissance, even though Tom argued that the Russians had already grabbed that word, Vozrozhdeniye, for their collapsed undertaking. A new hire, considered enormously talented in her work of inducing a condition known as “horror autotoxicus” in mice, said that the word was goddamned nearly unpronounceable and that the Russians only claimed that was what it meant. And what standing did the Russians have anyway in any of their considerations? Her views carried the day.
After Caroline died, he returned to Russia where he acquired a serious vodka dependency and did watercolors—surprisingly easy to execute—of the poisoned steppes. He worked with anthrax, played volleyball when he wasn’t too hung over and tried to get his nerve back.
Sometimes he’d go to the cemetery outside the old testing grounds with his Russian friends. They were always stumbling drunk, they would pour vodka on the graves of those who had accidentally infected themselves with the viruses they were weaponizing. “This one here,” one of them shouted over the wind, “was buried with the notebook where he documented the progress of his hemorrhagic fever. Hemorrhaging like your Old Faithful. A hero. A real man.” Beneath the tumbled plots lay the zinc-lined coffins. The wind shrieked and moaned. Once they’d left the door open on the sedan they’d arrived in and it was ripped off to fly across the ashen land like a cafeteria tray.
When he finally came home, his clearance was revoked and he was fired.
He loitered around the house for a few months drinking and watching the weeds recolonize his neglected yard. In his opinion, it took the utility companies a remarkably long time to turn off the electric, gas and water for nonpayment, but when they
did, he put the ironwood box that contained his wife’s ashes on the passenger seat of his Jaguar and drove away. After hundreds of miles he stopped at a bar and was surprised to learn it was New Year’s Eve. “Amateur night,” the bartender said, looking at him distrustfully. Bugs Bunny cartoons played on a screen in the corner. “He used to be a deity,” the woman on the stool beside him said loudly and not to him, “and look what they’ve done to him, they’ve taken away his powers.” When he emerged some hours later under the somber regard of a starless sky, he realized, though not immediately, that the Jaguar had been stolen.