by Joy Williams
He had the worst hangover of his life. It was blinding, unprecedented. But even after it had slowly passed, he sensed that his vision had been compromised and would no longer be performing its previously reliable duties. Cornea, iris, pupil, lens, retina, optic nerve. Even when the whole package was functioning perfectly you could see things and not understand what you were seeing.
Caroline had wanted to see the flowers of the Queen of the Night but the plant didn’t bloom until late in the spring. It was just an inconspicuous stick but when it flowered it was an ethereal sight, you really couldn’t enjoy it enough when it flowered. She had seen it once and she wanted to see it again but spring was too far, too far for her. He’d gone to a nursery and asked if the bloom couldn’t be forced and the nurseryman said he didn’t think so but he was still learning. He wasn’t even a nurseryman yet, just an employee. And he was from back east so he actually knew shit all about the area and its plants. Just the other day he’d been told that spines evolved from leaves and he still didn’t know whether to believe it because he’d been told, too, that you couldn’t look at a tree and say the name of it at the same time so he suspected they were still hazing him.
Tom never knew if the Queen of the Night he’d bought had ever flowered. Some years they don’t. Sometimes sticks stay sticks.
The ironwood box had been broken open surely. Had the thief possessed the decency to inter the ashes in an appropriate manner or dispose of them with ceremony on the wind over a great sea?
It was unlikely.
He struck his knee viciously, accidentally, against the fish tank and limped outside, into the enervated light.
* * *
—
The resort had several pools, none of them functional. Honey preferred the one filled with specific trash—paintings, furniture, broken bottles—for her training. The rooms here had been filled with art, but the canvases were in fragments now and the colored shards of glass snapped and shone among them. She adored training. Training and exclaiming:
Democratically approved protest is doomed!
Legitimate murder is no match for illegitimate mayhem.
She loved giving herself over to training and exclaiming much as she had loved donating blood or getting baptized. She’d been baptized a dozen times. She’d become a little compulsive about it, she guessed. Pentecostal storefronts, burby churches, white Congoed steepled establishments, cavernous Baptist temples…in all she had been welcomed and received, desperately in some cases. She liked whatever—the water poured, daubed, rubbed or sprinkled from silver fonts or humble bowls—but she preferred dips in octagonal pools or full immersion in “natural” bodies of water. Her baptism in a river, which she had so excitedly anticipated, proved to be her last, however, when she found she simply could not ignore the scrap of turquoise carpet floating past, the snaggle of brush and rope and plastic jugs, even a ragged fleecy leg pointing straight to heaven.
There goes the devil, a flame-haired, sopping wet boy observed, pointing at the cloven hoof, and seemed quite pleased.
After that, though Honey was hardly a cleanliness freak, she tried to fulfill her sacral needs through giving blood. She had just wanted to give and give. But then someone told her that they really didn’t need as much blood as they were always calling for and they ended up throwing half of it away, either from carelessness or because it had expired. There was an expiration date for everything. And then someone told her that blood mostly went to the super wealthy who depended upon frequent transfusions for mental acuity, increased sexual drive and renewal of unequivocally ruthless behavior in the service of making more money. Blood transfusions were tremendously rejuvenating and less superstitious than ingesting powdered rhino horn.
Honey had been greatly disturbed by this information but it had been difficult to curtail her donations. She had to slowly wean herself from giving blood. She was like a diver sipping air—or whatever it is that they sip—coming up, rising from the unnatural element of deprivation, rising slowly so as to avoid the niggles and the bends, the chokes and the staggers, to avoid ultimately, death on the greasy boards of the lurching vessel, floating waveringly above. She felt mean like a hoarder—she was hoarding her own blood.
This was why she’d taken up extreme training. Training wasn’t everyone’s dish of sherbet. Actually no one trained here the way she did but she did not hold this against them. Once she’d asked Hector if he’d ever given blood and he replied that he could not because his blood was too blue. She thought that was a riot. Hector was crazy but so courteous. He never asked about the tunnel like mean old Scarlett. Should I take the tunnel then? Scarlett was always asking when of course there was no tunnel, Honey was quite sure. She believed more in a kind of bridge.
The bridge will appear when you cross it!
She just hoped she wouldn’t have to go through the hospital again. It wasn’t just that she owed them so much money. It was the questions, God, the questions they’d asked her.
What’s your favorite territory?
The sea, she’d said.
Ahh, the sea. The world’s heartbreaking beauty will remain when there is no heart to break for it.
Or perhaps a little sheltered beach by the sea, she’d amended. Like a cove.
We want to manage your pain. But we can’t help you if you don’t believe in us.
What do you want me to believe, she’d said.
In us.
Oh she hoped she wouldn’t have to pass through that place again.
She moved back and forth across the mess in the pool, her movements something between tai chi and a tango. She could devote herself to the struggle against her very human condition for hours. She never cut her feet on the glass now. Her feet were hard as horn.
She saw Tom inching his way toward a chair under a collapsing cabana. She waited until he had settled himself, then called out pleasantly, “Many times I think I was born for this!” Not sure of his acknowledgment, she added, “This place.”
After a moment he said, “You were, of course.”
“It makes me so happy to know our deaths are going to count.” There was no reason to think Gordon was right. Why should she trust him with her happiness?
“Yeah,” Tom said. “It’s nice all right.”
“It’s like giving God something He doesn’t have. A gift, a real gift.”
“If He doesn’t have it, He probably doesn’t need it,” Tom said.
“That’s so funny! You’re right, I mustn’t take myself too seriously. The only weird thing will be dying in a crowd after living alone for so long, responsible only to myself and then being responsible for so many, waking them up and then extinguishing them at the same time.” She clambered out of the pool and arranged herself beside him. “I have absolutely no horror of dying. One can only have a horror of dying in a world that has invited one to live.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Where is that invitation anyway? I was told to expect it anytime.” He mimed distress, confusion, as he paddled at the pocket of his shirt, searching.
“We wouldn’t want to be invited now,” Honey said worriedly. “But imagine receiving a proper invitation, on nice stationery, heavy cream-colored stationery…you are cordially invited…”
“We got one once but we lost it,” Tom said. “What we’ve been waiting for is the replacement invitation.”
“Like a passport. My passport was stolen and when I applied for another one the picture they took wasn’t of me at all. So I decided I didn’t want one.”
Tom covered his left eye and squinted into the distance, then moved his hand to his right eye. Was one not quite so sick? Yes, the left, not so bad. It takes triangular eyes to see heaven, the Russians say.
“You know where I wanted to travel? Russia! Isn’t that funny? You spent a lot of time there, didn’t you? Tell me about the Russians, they’re very
soulful, aren’t they. What do they talk about?”
“Good and evil,” Tom granted her. “Death and the mother.”
“Yes, yes, I knew it!” Honey studied him. He was a good-looking man with a pasty complexion and a crease on one side of his head as though someone had gone in there once and taken something out though it might be that the crease could be nothing more than an illusion caused by a bad haircut.
“You did a lot of damage in a professional capacity over there, didn’t you,” Honey said. “My damage was in the unprofessional line. I just took up space. An increasing amount of space. You could say I had a kind heart, heart of gold but so what. I wasn’t the kind of being the earth required and I could tell you the exact moment I realized I wasn’t the kind of being the earth required.”
Tom dropped his hands from his face. He wanted her to describe the moment, this interested him. He could not tell her the moment when he realized this about himself because he had ignored it. He had put much effort into the many days thereafter, ignoring it. That effort became his life.
“When was the moment you realized?” he finally said.
She sighed. “I told you already. I just told you.”
“What are your plans now?” he asked. Had she told him that as well? He felt there was something familiar about what was coming next.
“I’m going to destroy Phoenix.”
“Oh yeah,” Tom said. “They never should have named it that. Or put it where they did.”
“They just hijacked a lovely story and for what? To give name to a stinking metropolis.”
He agreed it was an outrage.
“When the creature the Phoenix realizes it is growing old, it builds a funeral pyre of branches and by turning its body toward the sun it beats its wings until it burns up,” Honey recounted dreamily. “And then it rises again from the ashes. Nine days, I think. Nine days later it comes back good as new.”
“That part’s a little sketchy.”
“Sometimes the creature builds its own coffin, lies down in it and just dies. Still, the result is the same.”
“Took a lot of nerve to call that place Phoenix,” he said again, more or less.
“The Hohokum were there first, for a century and more, but then mysteriously vanished. Hohokum means all used up or departed. And that’s what’s going to happen to the Phoenicians, too, do you agree?”
“Absolutely,” Tom said. “Replicability and repeatability are scientific facts.”
“I love it when they say these sophisticated prehistoric civilizations ‘mysteriously vanished.’ What do they take us for?”
“Fools. They take us for fools.”
“They flaunt their stolen water. They have fountains there which is criminal!”
“Fountains, freeways, the seat of government, an inefficient sewage treatment plan, a vast and smug population, the whole ball of wax.”
“They’re going to think it was an act of God but it’s going to be an act of Honey.”
“They’ll never see you coming.”
“That is so nice of you to say! Do you know the legal definition of an act of God? It’s something which no reasonable person could have expected.”
“Hadn’t heard that one.”
“A little kid told me that.”
“No reasonable beings anymore, no acts of God either.”
“He’s an odd little kid. I just saw him once, but I think he’s still here. Though he shouldn’t be, this is no place for him.”
“No place for children of any stripe.”
“Children should not be instructed in the suicide arts,” Honey mused. “But then again, why not? Ideally, it should just be part of their education. Most school textbooks…don’t get me started.”
“Think I’ll head back to my room,” Tom said wearily.
“You want me to help you?”
“I’ve become an old man, afraid of falling,” he said in wonder.
“If we weren’t operating out of this blessed place, we’d just die of our disabilities. I’ve heard that Gordon will be giving out little paper scrolly things if our capabilities have changed.” She hesitated. “Has he given one to you?”
“Little paper scrolly things?”
“He’s determined to shoo us out of this place. He said, I think he was quoting somebody, it sounds a little old-fashioned, he said, ‘We are tenants at will of this clayey farm, not for any term of years. The condition of our entrance was finally to depart.’ Do you remember him saying that?”
“Uhmm,” Tom said.
“Has he given one to you?” she asked again hesitantly. She pictured the paper of a quality similar to one in a fortune cookie, though lacking the fortune’s disarming shell.
“Not yet.”
“Your original intention was so heroic. It’s a shame.”
“Overly ambitious. Needs a younger person to implement.”
“Well we have to live in the now. To be anywhere other than the now is to paint eyeballs on chaos.”
“Good God!” Tom exclaimed.
She blushed. What an inconsiderate thing to say to a person of failing sight! “That was some crazy thing I heard once,” she said hurriedly. “It made an impression on me but I’ve never understood it.”
He laughed and she felt happy again.
“You can leave with me before Gordon gives you the little paper scrolly thing,” she suggested. “We’d look harmless twice over. They don’t expect people like us to turn on them. That’s our advantage. They don’t expect us to care.”
Tom didn’t want to make his exit with Honey. “The shit list is long,” he said. “I’ll find an alternative.”
“The shit list is so long! I had lots of first choices. I wanted to strike a blow for the aquatics but their situation made me so sad I couldn’t think clearly whereas with Phoenix, it was easy to be coldly focused.”
He slowly rose to his feet. “My eyes have adjusted some. I can make my own way.”
“Well we all have to, but here, take advantage, you won’t have me here tomorrow.” She snared his hand in hers. It was large and soft and surprising as a boxing glove.
“The sense of imminent revolution is very strong,” Honey said. “I can smell it in the air.”
He could not. He could smell that dreadful lake if he so allowed. Deposited at his door, he felt like a child who had been ushered across a dangerous intersection, naturally against his will.
“This was the finest final day I could have hoped for,” Honey said. “I suspected I’d be alone, feeling anxious, clumsy, not up to the challenge…”
“I feel better too,” he lied.
“Though I kind of wish I’d seen that girl, that Khristen girl again,” she said honestly.
* * *
—
All night Tom lay awake.
To see is to forget the name of the thing you see.
That’s what the foolish nurseryman had been told and misremembered when Tom had gone to him seeking the Queen of the Night.
Now, against his will he remembered the priest his wife had insisted upon and the priest was odious and familiar, as was to be expected. He had said, “The soul cannot be possessed of the divine union until it has divested itself of the love of all created beings.” He attributed this to St. John of the Cross. He urged her to let go, let go, that was the ticket.
When the man left, Caroline said with her last strength, “I can’t do that, Tom. I love you. I love everything we had together.”
He’d held her hands and kissed them. The truth was that he had divested himself of loving, even his dear Caroline, long ago and nothing had happened, nothing had changed. Nothing. It had even frightened him a little.
He rose from his bed and opened the door to the night. It was stifling, inside and out. He was on the ground floor. He shuf
fled to the edge of the strip of buckled concrete and peed into the dirt. The few drops he managed made no sound yet a playful breeze nudged him with a brief and acrid stink. Behind him, the door to his room gaped open uninvitingly, as did the door beside it. This was Grayson’s room. The shabby chorister, once so desperate for conversation. He had wanted to talk about religion and exchange crosses, which was right out of Dostoevsky certainly, Myshkin, the virtuous idiot, so good he was easily destroyed by others. Tom was pleased to make the connection though he had had no crosses to exchange save for the most metaphorical ones.
Grayson no longer seemed to be in residence, however.
Every room had been occupied when he first arrived and the turnover had been brisk. They were a gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth. He was probably the most skilled at mayhem of the lot, his life’s work aimed at eliminating the eliminators, or those who were perceived to be the eliminators, but that was the old, coolly rational way.
His Russian friends could go all weepy over the first sticky buds of spring, the tender leaves unfurling, and then direct their considerable energies to creating mayhem and disease.
How morbidly merry they had been. If he’d stayed over there he certainly would have found himself at the mercy of events. “We are at the mercy of events,” he’d slur of an evening to his good-natured associates, always a reliable guffaw getter. He would have poisoned himself with alcohol by now, or frozen to death.
How they loved their germs. You had to raise them responsibly, as you would a child. Protect them, keep them from becoming precocious too soon. These were germs too nuanced to kill. Why kill when one can dis-create the fundamentals? It had occupied him deeply to horse around in such a way, raising “the kids,” the germ events, the bastard rascals.
Toward the east he sensed something struggling to make its appearance, the ashy-fingered dawn no doubt—a new day, departure day—and was reminded of Gordon’s commanding paper scrolls. Did they even exist? It seemed a little theatrical, a little party favorish. Honey could well have misheard or misinterpreted something in passing. Eyeballs on chaos after all…He wondered if she had left. Did she have any idea how far Phoenix was? She’d be lucky to make a klick on those swollen pins.