by Joy Williams
She stood by the little plot. The earth was gray and the fruit was small and misshapen. She reached out her hand and an astonishing pain ripped through it. Her arm was sheared from her body, and then she felt her great breasts being flayed, ripped in strips like you would do to bundles of old sheets to provide for something or someone in an emergency situation.
Her whole life. It was as though it hadn’t happened yet, or had, and had been forgotten and replaced with only this.
* * *
—
Khristen wanted to tell Lola about the scorpions. This didn’t seem to be their natural habitat though nothing seemed to be moving through a natural habitat anymore.
The great door to the hotel’s lobby was open, indeed it seemed to have been partially torn from its hinges. She could just make out, within, a chair upon which the old man sat, the old woman perched like a child upon his lap.
“Hello, dear,” Lola said.
She looked dreadful, decrepit. Her few little sprigs of hair lay flat against her skull.
“Jeffrey and his mother have left. Were you able to say goodbye? I told her she shouldn’t drive in her condition but she ignored me of course. She left the place spotless however. I was surprised.”
“Grebe,” Khristen said.
“Why yes! I remember those birds only faintly. They never laughed like their brothers and sisters, the loons.” She coughed for a moment in a violent fashion. “We’re going soon too. You mustn’t leave with us but you can’t stay here.”
“She could stay here,” the old man offered. “She could study the humanities. Pry open those books, bury herself alive in them.”
“Gordon’s all bark,” Lola said. “He’s the one who devoted himself to the humanities for years in one of those idyllic preparatory schools with the bell towers, the chapel, the courts of clay…”
“We were reminiscing just before you arrived,” Gordon said. “I’m in your debt actually. You kept old Lola going until I could get back. Perhaps you will be rewarded. Though it’s possible you won’t be rewarded at all. Pull up a chair.”
“These two chairs have been in my life since I was a little girl,” Lola said. “I was never allowed to sit on them so I pretended they were electric chairs. What fascination they held for me!”
“When our great inventors were first indulging in this execution frolic, they tested the voltage on elephants,” Gordon said.
Khristen had not seen these chairs before. Everything here was poorly mended or merely broken, but these were intact. “You brought these from your childhood?” she wondered.
“Oh no, dear,” Lola said.
“Sit down then,” Gordon said. “It’s sturdy. Could accept two or three of you. As I said, we were reminiscing, discussing the little contest that took place long before you were born. I was in the aforementioned prestigious school. My classmates and I were groomed for success. Encouraged to hammer down absolute distinctions between man, nature and the supernatural. Going strong for two hundred years, then we lose the contest and it was irrelevancy for us within six months.”
“It rankles him still. But Gordon, you must admit, yours was not an original submission.”
“We were traditionalists.”
“Tell the story to Khristen. She’ll appreciate it.”
“I was fifteen in that excellent institution. Lola was a mere five, in a distant kindergarten.”
“I’m ten years younger than Gordon and always will be,” Lola said with satisfaction.
“The government was sponsoring a contest which all schools were encouraged to enter. The challenge was to design a symbol for nuclear depositories, weapons cemeteries, sterile spaces. Only the younger generations could work on it. It was all very hush-hush. Delivering the perfect ideogram would have been enormously prestigious. Winning would secure our school’s reputation as the great incubator of our country’s leaders for yet another two hundred years. We were so confident, so certain of our supremacy in pretty much every endeavor that we felt that coming up with an image that would indicate that certain vast tracts of the planet had been poisoned by human endeavor for all eternity and should never be approached would be a piece of cake. That the image’s message, as we understood the guidelines, should be elliptical yet direct, that its immediate effect on the viewer should be devastating yet not annihilative to the human spirit—that is, while instilling fear, it would avoid eliciting panic—was also not beyond our patriotic powers. We were confident because this school, our school, bred us to prevail. We knew we would win. But we didn’t win. We lost.”
“It looked much like a sea star,” Lola said. She looked so small on Gordon’s lap, wearing her faded dress. He wore a fulsome coat which revealed only his weeping hands and face. Scaly, speckled, very awful, as the chorister had noted.
With the nail of his index finger, Gordon drew in the dust on the table.
“A sea star!” Khristen exclaimed. She remembered them on a shelf, mummified, with shells and the dried jaws of fishes.
“That was our entry. Instead the contest was won by a bunch of kidlets who didn’t even have their feathers yet, a common primary school class. Lola’s. She was in the winner’s circle even then.”
“But winning became losing, Gordon, as you are well aware,” Lola said. “Upon further consideration, the government did not find our submission appropriate to their intentions and the prize was rescinded. The Awards Committee was discredited and the hounding of our little group began. We were monitored constantly. We were not allowed to share snacks, we were forbidden to paint. They took away our pretty snakes and our monk parrot. Just busted in and put their fists in his cage and took him away. They said he was not native to the region. ‘Marvelous is a good boy, Marvelous is a good boy,’ he kept saying to no avail. Off he was taken to quarantine and certain death. They burnt our desks and forced our teacher out. They rescinded her certificate. She fled to the Great Desert and endured several ruthless winters. The winters were screaming fierce, it was just beginning then. We kept in feral contact at first. ‘Why don’t you leave?’ we’d say, meaning why don’t you come back. ‘Leave,’ she’d say, ‘Why it’s all I can do to stay.’ ”
Both Lola and Gordon chuckled at this.
“She was a visionary, that dumpy dear playground monitor, but only that once. The annunciatory image announced itself to her and she shared it with us. We set aside our usual materials, the popsicle sticks and uncooked macaroni, the glitter and flour and glycerol, and turned to the task of a lifetime. How happy we were then, how industrious.”
“At least they didn’t starve you pups. In the old days if your election was overturned your political opponents would starve you to death. Your sons as well. And your grandsons. Daughters and granddaughters it goes without saying. Many would like the custom reinstated.”
“Can you tell me what it was, the sign you made?” Khristen asked Lola.
“The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao,” Gordon giggled. “The Tao that can be named…Goodness, I wish I could wipe tears of laughter from my eyes.” To Khristen, he said, “Their winning entry was babyish. It was exactly what you might expect from a pod of carelessly indoctrinated little children. It was an ark. A comically familiar ark.”
“But the ark was empty,” Lola said. “Myriad creatures were present but they were below the vessel, supporting it. The ark was no longer protecting them, they were protecting the ark. Behind this centerpiece was a charred earth, before it, a chalky blankness.”
“That’s the part the authorities misinterpreted,” Gordon said. “They saw what lay ahead as a clean slate where human ingenuity could play and prosper and provide. A new frontier.”
“Others saw the chalky fog as a fathomless depth of ignorance, apathy and the inadequacy of response.”
“When the disparity of perception was noted there was…concern,” Gordon sa
id.
“In many regards, we were meticulously by the book. The ark had three decks, three stories, and there was but one window and one door. But there were absences that made them uneasy. The ark lacked the sea. We children had failed to provide the squiggles.”
“The squiggles,” Gordon said delightedly. “The lack of squiggles made the prize givers increasingly suspicious. How could such innocent hands and hearts be so sly, so susceptible to nihilism!”
“In the end,” Lola said, “the dangerous and ever multiplying sequestrums were simply put off limits behind the usual affairs—fences, walls, electric fields, unpleasant lights. They even employed the image offered by Gordon and his crowd for they realized it had just been copied from an Egyptian hieroglyph. What seemed a sea star meant kingdom of death.”
“We were entitled but lazy,” Gordon admitted.
“The design for a permanent danger marker for the future—for future humans—was put on hold, though the original intention of warning rather than edification was stressed. A blue-ribbon panel was empowered to study the challenge. There were two anthropologists, an archaeologist, an astronomer, two geologists, a linguist and a cognitive psychologist. When one died they cycled in another of the same discipline.”
“Future humans, such a reckless concept,” Gord0n said. “Well, such expertise is unnecessary now. The old thinking has been replaced by the new thinking. The aborted are being adopted in colorful ceremonies and the graveyards are being plowed to plant corn.”
“It’s so unlike what I had hoped,” murmured Lola.
“The hair of the dead is being woven into handy baskets and totes. Everything is being utilized. Only the animals are still mourning the death of their kind. It’s become a bit of a sport to watch them grieve.”
Khristen suddenly felt the chair crumple beneath her. It wasn’t so sturdy after all. She leapt up but looking at it, she saw it was the same, unbroken.
“You must have more faith in yourself, dear,” Lola said.
“ ‘God seeketh again that which is passed away,’ ” Gordon said, his breath whistling, a dimpled void between the words. “That’s what my Lola likes to say and I always agree. He seeketh. But will He findeth?”
“Did the scorpions find you, dear?”
“I saw them,” Khristen said. “I meant to tell you.”
“But where are they?”
“Outside. They were so golden. I thought it strange.”
“They were meant to travel with you, dear.”
“Lola’s always had a fondness for the minor deities,” Gordon said.
Lola sighed. “Would you mind getting us some water, dear. I’m just so tired I don’t want to move.”
Khristen went to the washroom off the lobby. She inspected the folds of her clothes but they harbored no scorpions. Drops leaked from the little sink’s faucet but turning the handle provided nothing more. There were no cups or glasses about. There was nothing to bear the water in at all except her hands.
Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown,
Big enough for my feet. It is my home.
It is always beyond them. The future
Splits the present with the echo of my voice.
Hoarse with fulfillment, I never made promises.
“Noah’s Raven”
W. S. Merwin
Does God care whether you are living or dead?
[………………….]
But would that not presume He loves the living more than the dead? And would that not be unendurable for those who had believed in Him?
His mother had christened him PeterPaul. She thought both names were pretty, she didn’t want to choose. His mother was so…she was so…hapless.
“You know what they’re gonna call me,” he said, as soon as he was old enough to figure, “they’re gonna call me Pee Pee, Ma.”
“There are great churches named PeterPaul,” she said, throwing more ingredients into one of her wretched casseroles. She used weed, like parsley, as a garnish. “Whyever would they think of calling you Pee Pee?”
“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul,’ Ma, have you?” He felt canceled out, a zero.
What a battle it had been, quashing the mockery of his name. He’d had to be ever suspicious and alert and confident. But it was only after the incident, that awful unfair incident with that baby in that unlucky house, that the taunt had at last ceased. No one wanted to refer to him at all. He had become superstitiously nameless.
He wasn’t Catholic anymore. He had left the church when his mother died though he lived in the same house they’d always lived in. All of her junk was still there but he’d placed it in one room and closed the door. He’d get around to cleaning it out one day and distributing her effects wisely and rationally—her broken-down shoes, her collection of plastic bangles, her rosaries, ditto her smelly hose, her candy tins. Everything hers was in there. She herself was in the damp hypogeum in the lee of St. Margaret’s, a place with serious drainage issues that the parish left unaddressed and which he was loath to visit.
The very day he buried her he had begun the process to legally change his name to Nolo. You could do just about anything you wanted to if you went through the proper channels. He then began training as a paramedic, a first responder. He liked strong-arming any hysterical family member or friend at the scene, to treat them like criminals which they practically were, for they were alive and their purported loved ones who they were screaming about were damn near not.
He had no respect for the hospital out of which he worked—Mercy—nor for the police, with whom he was frequently paired. Don’t call the cops, call your mother, the wits said, and concerning Mercy, First they kill you, then they bill you.
“Nolo,” one of the cops had ventured early on. “Like nolo contendere?”
“You got it.”
“That’s not bad, man. Good positioning. You can’t be too careful, right?”
His mother had died of a congested heart, had drowned in her body’s own fluids. She hadn’t taken care of herself, she’d been foolish and timid, addicted to hope and ginger candies. He never consumed sweets or alcohol, he never prayed or brooded. He lived simply—a futon, a few bowls, boots he took very good care of. He was in excellent physical condition, lean with rage. He ran, often with a thirty-pound pack of rocks on his back. He was solitary and furious. People left him and his mother’s broken-down house alone.
He was watching a hockey game with one of his acquaintances, Denver Erie Ford. People had been naming their children after dangerous cities for some time now. Denver claimed to have been the beginning of the trend some thirty years before.
“You were probably conceived there, in the Mile-High City,” Nolo said.
“I’m sure I was,” Denver agreed, “but the idea’s become decadent. Things are cyclic and at the end of the cycle is decadence.”
“That sounds right.”
“Like you notice the players are all inking Bible verses on their sticks.”
“These ones aren’t.”
“These ones suck,” Denver said. “They’re leaking oil.” He was a 911 operator but he’d been told to kick back, take a break, take a long weekend. “It’s not a mile high anymore,” he mused. “It shrunk.”
“I thought you’d been canned.”
“No, no, no, absolutely not, not canned,” Denver protested. “They just want me to get some rest. It’s a stressful job. Somebody drives their car off the road into a canal and the filthy water’s halfway up the windows and you have to keep saying, ‘What were the last cross streets you remember?’ And you have to speak totally without affect.”
“But you lost your total lack of affect, I heard. I believe you said to some
frightened caller, ‘Disaster can sometimes result in supreme victory.’ ”
“I’d been reading the great dramatists,” Denver said. “I mean the real great dramatists. The Tragedians. They got to me, man.”
“Everyone’s heard the tape. They’re loving it. Woman’s having a meltdown and you’re saying, ‘Calamity is often necessary for rebirth.’ ”
“Well it is, even for the ladies, though I must admit, the great dramatists don’t give the ladies much slack to play hero. The fact remains that spiritual progress often depends upon physical disaster. The hero, surviving this, brings with him into the future a past world for re-creation by a divinity whose nature has been recast during the struggle.”
“What struggle?”
“You’re not listening. The struggle with circumstances that want to crush him. The messenger arrives. In great tragedies, the other characters have fallen away at the end.”
“At the denouement?”
“Yeah, the denouement. That’s not the way you pronounce it though. The hero faces the gods alone.”
“I think that woman’s going to sue you.”
“In tragedy, everything has happened before it begins. The messenger appears and relates the circumstances of death, the violence of which is seldom portrayed upon the stage. This in itself is a deliberate rejection of opportunity, theatrical opportunity. The messenger is nobody but he holds all the cards, man.” Denver looked at the brawl proceeding in real time on the ice. “Sometimes I just want to kick this fucking screen in.”
“Change the channel.”
Denver ran through a dozen, stopped, reversed. “I could get killed doing this.”