by Joy Williams
“Hallooo…”
Tom startled violently. His vision cleared for an instant and there was Gordon in all his awfulness.
“Hear that you’re going blind,” Gordon said companionably.
“Yes, I…The deterioration in the last few days has been…”
“Pretty dramatic I bet.”
“Sorry to be so slow in getting that out,” Tom said.
“From that which I do not see an endless world arises.”
Tom said nothing.
“It’s all just electrical impulses,” Gordon said. “Rods and cones transforming light into waves. The waves carry data through the optic nerve to the brain whereupon the brain forms images. So it is that we actually see not with the eyes but with the brain. Just a technicality.”
“Would you like to sit down somewhere?” Tom asked. His legs suddenly felt shaky.
“Sure. In your room? Sit on your bed if that’s all right?”
“Yes,” Tom said.
“Where is it?”
“What.”
“Your bed.”
“Oh,” Tom said.
“OK then,” Gordon said. “So you no longer find this place to your liking anymore? This place of preparation for a meaningful death that would provide redress?”
Dawn was moving with graceless haste into bright day. It was hot. Gordon was wearing a coat, perhaps to protect his skin. The coat was darkly florid, preposterous.
“I wanted to provide redress,” Tom admitted.
“For a life poorly lived…Do you remember a group called Friends of the Earth, Tom? FOE?”
“Yes, I tried to contact them shortly before I arrived. I had a lot of information that could be modified to their approach. But they’d gone underground. I couldn’t find them.”
“Underground?!” Gordon shrieked. “They were erased! Thoughtful, selfless, beautiful people, really. The last of the true advocates. FOE, what a pathetic acronym for a group so unformidable. Underground,” he giggled. “Actually it’s true, you weren’t being misled.”
“I didn’t know. I thought they were still active but not as…as visible.”
“Post-FOE, there’s the terrible trinity. The relativists, the survivalists and groups of filthy youth who think they can still save the earth by grinding up some modest nut or bean for pancake meal. Have you ever had one of their goddamn proselytizing pancakes?”
“I don’t believe I have.”
“They make cooking fires of turds. But even those poor clowns are being denied permits. And without a permit, they’re not even allowed a good cry.”
“Who issues the permits?”
“The minister of energy,” Gordon giggled. “The minister of energy handles pretty much everything now. You have to pity the fools who still want to recycle their toothbrushes and plant apple trees. Let them turn the lights off or never turn them on, it can’t matter now. They were inoculated against bringing down the system with their toddler shots.”
“What I need to know,” Tom said, “rather what I would appreciate knowing, is why you came back. I didn’t think we were supposed to come back. We were supposed to leave and engage—throw our spoiling carcasses on the earth’s wounds while taking out a couple of bastards.”
“We’re pulling the plug here, Tom. You’ve waited too long. If you’re allowed a few moments of perception when you leave you’ll find that the aged and dying are once again reduced to being only laughably feisty or touchingly grateful or predictably demented or whiningly fuddled.”
“I’ve heard that you’re going to give us an ultimatum.”
There was an odd smell, like earth untouched beneath a pleasant porch.
“I spoke with Grayson earlier. Nice little fellow. Quiet. Anti-triumphant. Terrible procrastinator though. When he finally unwrapped what I gave him, he said, ‘Whose handwriting is this?’ Somewhere he was encouraged to believe that irrelevant inquiry is a successful parry.”
“What was it? Did he accept?”
“Oh he had no choice. It was a good one. Womb banks.”
“What are they?” Tom said cautiously.
“His next question exactly. They’re harvesting wombs from brain-dead donors to have on hand for uterine transplants. Fertility doctors want to offer their patients more opportunities. They’re inspired by those women who want the experience of pregnancy even if they have to borrow a dead girl’s womb. Another remarkable example of civilization unraveled, in irreversible decline. By hitting a bunch of womb storage facilities Grayson will be sideswiping at least one aspect of the irresponsible future.”
“It doesn’t seem…”
“His was a life of uncreative solitude. Who knows what he would have chosen for himself. It was never clear. Anyway, after a bit he pulled himself together and went off caroling something or other. Terrible voice.”
Tom’s eyes burned behind his glasses. But when he raised his hand to remove them he couldn’t locate them. “Do you happen to see my glasses about?”
“I do. Here they are.”
He felt Gordon’s fingers which were rough and wet, and shrank away.
“You probably don’t need them but if they make you feel more comfortable…”
“You’re right. No. Don’t need them,” Tom said.
“Have you ever reflected on what earth’s advance directive would be, Tom?”
“I’m ashamed to say, no.”
“You think she’d want treatment even if there were no cure? Even if treatment only ensured that her dying would be more prolonged? Or do you think she’d ask for comfort care only?”
“I’d say it was just as well the earth didn’t entrust us with a directive,” Tom said. “She shouldn’t have entrusted us with anything.”
“Nature’s too innocent, no match against our designs. Anyone who’s served their country as long as you have knows that to be true.”
“I did what was asked of me,” Tom said. “I drew the line at doing more.”
“Quite a rebellious constitution you’ve got.”
“I’m detestable, I wish I could be punished.”
“But you’re not going to be,” Gordon said piously. “Not really.”
“I’m no longer sure I know what this place is. I thought I did. When I found it, I felt I’d kicked myself up a rung, that a fresh destiny would be mine and I would be serving good, not a superficial good, but something deep, a good incomprehensible to conditioned minds.”
Gordon laughed. “That’s what you thought you were doing before. And now you think you imagined this place? The possibility it afforded you? The second chance?” He pushed his hand into the pocket of his overcoat.
Tom realized that what Honey had called a little paper scrolly thing was about to be delivered. It was undoubtedly nothing he would have chosen but he had never chosen wisely or well. There was the familiar yet strange smell again, desirable and dangerous. Time was withdrawing from him, Tom could feel it. Still, there was enough time remaining to wonder how Gordon could withstand the heaviness of that coat, for the day had become warm, the heat was ungodly really, a tenor of heat that on those steppes that had comprised so much of his life caused the shepherd dogs to go mad and tear all the lambs they lived to guard to pieces.
* * *
—
The place didn’t appear to Khristen to be any more decrepit than usual but a silence had fallen over everything. It was the wind, she thought. The wind had ceased and with it the appearance of movement, of life. The meeting in Laundery had sounded some closing note and everyone had scattered as though a dark predator had arrived.
She wandered the ruined web of the resort’s grounds. Many of the buildings’ wings had burned, leaving enormous charred timbers. The ground, too, was charred shadow. She remembered a bit of fencing where sunflower stalks leaned, their great seedless
heads drooping, but she could no longer locate it. Things were always revealing and concealing themselves here. She felt she was undergoing a test she could not pass. Still, it all felt irretrievably familiar. Could this possibly have been the site of the conference her mother had attended in hopes of being part of the new thinking, in hopes of hearing the delivering word? But it had only been weeks, months at the most, since Khristen had left the school, and her mother had disappeared not long before that. Yet it had been years, many years possibly, since this place had been functioning, decaying even before the life outside it had collapsed.
She tried to imagine her mother here, listening to the utterances of fine minds. Daily existence is a falling into the inauthentic. Some fine mind came up with that. A dead mind, though the thoughts lived, the words. Appearing unsummoned. You listen to the dead with your eyes.
But there was no daily existence here. Nor could it possibly be authentic. If this had been the place her mother had denied everything to reach, she had arrived just before all of it was broken, when the finest minds still preached control and possession, adaptation and modification. Khristen had arrived to see it now, in ruins, the concert pavilions, the lecture halls, the gymnasiums and meditation chambers—the roofless library where the massive books slouched on broad shelves, rippled as though made of lead, their pages sealed, irretrievable.
Khristen would never locate a memory of her mother here. This was not a place of retrieval, of recognition. She would leave this place, as she had left her situation at the school before it and the situation before that, which ended the morning after her father’s death, when she had waited, all illusions of known home dissolved, watching a screen within which a bird, with futile care, turned an egg over and over in a nest of sticks. She remembered being given a glass of water while she waited and it slipped from her grasp and as the glass fell she, too, fell into a long moment and when she emerged from that moment, the glass had yet to smash to pieces upon the floor with the accompanying cry of surprise and dismay.
It is in such a moment where the dead reside, forever.
She could have offered her mother that. It is like Death is the long moment outside the smash-up that is life.
She passed the sunflowers with their dark averted faces. There they were! She had never gotten her bearings on these broken grounds. She would have been an inadequate guide certainly had Lola employed her in that fashion. But that was a suggestion that had been made only once and Khristen had not again seen the truck she’d driven here, the old professor’s truck.
She moved into a small clearing which afforded a glimpse of the hotel. She had not wandered far from it at all. On the ground flickered something golden. It was a scorpion. She knelt to see it more clearly and saw six more.
* * *
—
The lake was behind her. Honey thought it was funny, well, horrible actually, that Lola called it Big Girl. In the beginning she tried to do what Lola did—go down to its shores in the evening when the sand was quick, it really was, almost, and say, “I love you, Big Girl!” which Honey felt was a bit like fervently addressing a corpse though she wouldn’t dream of saying that to Lola. She could almost believe that something was down there, some patron goddess, in retreat from a world from which the sacred had withdrawn. Her significance was contradictory, that was for sure. Now, with distance, she could even perceive Big Girl as a vast baptismal bowl. It only made sense that the waters of renewal in these dreadful times would have to be a little strange, even abhorrent, and certainly not inviting. Submergence should be fearsome, initiation an ordeal, ordination a grim awakening! Big Girl was perfect. After that meeting in Laundery they all should have entered her together, arms linked, a singing chain. Oh it would have been nice! It was important to see what things really were. That filthy river of her other life had been telling her one thing and she had heard something else entirely. She had not understood that river. She had denied it.
She rather wished she had stayed at the Institute, sharing this insight with others, entering Big Girl with joy. Wasn’t that what such a presence was for—a mystery to approach and be received?
No. She didn’t know what Big Girl was for. Even the gaunt clouds that had attended the lake in nightly vigil seemed uncertain.
In any case, she was outside the Institute now. She’d really done it, there was no going back.
She was passing beneath enormous windmills. The great blades advertising pharmaceuticals were still. They were probably still a lot, locked in place. Otherwise the drug companies wouldn’t be getting their money’s worth by sponsoring them.
When Honey was sixteen, a girl who was sixteen as well told them, all of them sixteen, sweet sixteen, that when a man and a woman are making a baby, if the sperm gets in there a second before or a second after, an entirely different person is made, the genes will be different. Seconds, minutes, hours, it makes a difference in who you are that you will never be aware of, the girl told them, that you couldn’t possibly know.
We know you’re nuts, one of them said. Jeans like Levi’s? You’re an idiot.
No one believed anything that girl said. Later she drank antifreeze at a Halloween party and died. She’d told everyone she was going to drink it but no one believed her. Honey had always been a little attracted to her. She’d wished she’d kissed her when she could have, earlier.
The blades of one of the windmills moved fractionally and then stopped. The names of the drugs on the blades were unbeautiful. Honey had never heard of them, they were a new generation of drugs.
The girl had swirled the liquid in the glass like she was a connoisseur of the stuff and then she drank it.
Honey hadn’t thought of that girl, or the wishing she had kissed her when she could have, in ages.
Oh she remembered terrible things. Sad things. She wanted to remember the happy now.
Once, after Honey had given blood, a pretty nurse had said to her in all seriousness, “We don’t want you to ride in fast elevators for the next twenty-four hours,” and Honey had said, “I don’t know any fast elevators.”
Those days were fun. Honey always looked at the blood they’d taken, that she’d given, she’d twist around on the rubbery bed they made you lie on and regard it. It was beautiful. And it was not a simple thing. Of its three precious components, all three were useful but plasma might be the best, for it treated shock. It was required for organ transplants, too, she knew. There were Packed Red Cells, Platelet Concentrate and Plasma. Platelet Concentrate was good for hemorrhage.
It was always strangers who got her blood. She never directed her donations like some people. Some people had a particular individual in mind. Or some people specified babies, just babies. Their blood went into special bags, just pediatric use. But your blood had to be O for the babies.
The underlying assumption in giving blood was that the invisible ones, the unknown ones who received it, were necessary. But that was a false assumption. They were not necessary. No one was necessary. This awareness was Honey’s evolvement. Once evolvement occurred, you saw the world differently and that was that.
Now she wasn’t sure whether the evolvement had occurred before she’d learned that prominent and powerful people purchased gallons of blood just to refresh themselves, or after. Or perhaps she hadn’t stopped giving blood by her own volition at all but because she’d been forbidden to. She’d been placed on a list of people forbidden.
Yet those early days had been so nice. After the pint was drawn she could have donuts, orange juice, crackers. Occasionally there were free movie tickets. T-shirts as well were sometimes given in gratitude. She’d had some good ones though none better than the last which had been her favorite even before she knew it was the last.
life is unpredictable, the need for blood is not
It depicted a happy-go-lucky fellow lounging on a beach float in the ocean. An island with a palm tree ne
arby. Under the float, a shark, jaws agape.
life is unpredictable, the need for blood is not
She mumbled this as she plodded along but soon it gave her no pleasure. On reflection it was imprecise. How could it be the case that the need for blood was predictable? She could very well envision a world where the need for blood was beside the point. There was blood and then there were the methods by which the blood was administered. Disrupt the methods of delivery and what have you got? Plastic baggies of trembling red fluid that had to be refrigerated and had an expiration date.
The windmills were behind her and she was passing through a shabby community of roofless houses. People were sitting on porches watching her. Honey paused by a little piece of turned earth, the remains of a garden, and labored to breathe. She should have considered this—she really couldn’t walk far, it was like walking on footballs. Her training was useless out here. Her poor feet, she couldn’t even see them.
A figure slowly hitched itself up from a rocking chair and waved a shotgun at her. She supposed the figure was human. The wind tossed his words away from her then tossed them back.
Get away from them tomatoes.
On the ridge, the wind was avoiding the inhospitable windmills, their club-like blades of fiercest white. It tore, unharnessed, about the valley instead.
Get away you.
You.
From them tomatoes.
Honey wore a poncho that grasped and scratched at her flesh when she raised a hand in greeting.
The people on the porch were openly staring at her. There were more than there had been, creeping out from around and beneath the house, from the adumbrated dark there. The building was in need of repair, every aspect of it. Even the harrow painted on the door was in need of a touch-up. Perhaps if she offered her assistance they would give her a morsel to eat. She had to eat something. A single tomato was all it would take to keep her going.