by Joy Williams
“What!”
“This old movie here. This is a great one, the one where the guy says, ‘I could get killed doing this,’ and the other guy says, ‘You could get killed walking your doggie.’ I love this one. Is that your pager?”
Another action by some elderlies on behalf of…God only knew what it was on behalf of. The little bit of respect the majority of their ilk had accrued just by being tediously and quietly old had been squandered by these nuts. These people had no moral poise in Nolo’s opinion. They were a disgrace.
“You’re the messenger,” Denver called out to him as he left. “Be the messenger.”
There was the usual mayhem. Flames, smoke, the air’s bitter tang, some plush and fetid hole of wonder opening up.
“What’s this building make, anyway?”
“Baby wipes? Salad bowls? I don’t know. Some goddamn switch for some goddamn thing.”
“Lots of law enforcement out here.”
“They’re not telling us anything. Just that there are no other known victims except for these two crazies.”
The old woman lay close to the old man, which allowed Nolo as he squatted to address both with ease. “Hey, Grandma,” he said to her, “you a follower of Mohammed?” There was no reply and he shook her. “Behold: Mohammed says, ‘I went to the gates of hell and it was filled with women. I went to the gates of heaven and it was filled with men.’ ” He shook her again. “You already passed, but listen, listen to me. I know you can still hear me, that’s the way it works, there have been studies. The only women Mohammed allows in heaven are the ones who died in childbirth. You should have taken that into consideration. You missed the great opportunity.
“Hey Pops,” he said, turning to the man. “How’s it going?”
With a grand unnecessary gesture, he slashed open the old fellow’s overcoat which was soft as a bird’s breast.
“You could have just unbuttoned it,” the old man said.
“No, no, this shows our belief that every second counts, that we did everything we could. But it was a nice coat. Now nobody’s going to want it. Your shirt red, Pops? Or is that blood?”
“Blood, I believe.”
“I don’t know much about medicine, I don’t have the patience for it but someone told me this once and it just stuck with me. Cancer cells are reproductive but not productive. And this. I like this even better, I think. Cancer cells are all delayed death and uncontrolled birth.”
“I don’t have cancer.”
“No? Well you’re very fortunate. But you’re not going to see the moon rise, Dad. Your chest cavity is seriously messed up. Why’d you want to blow yourselves up for, you and your haggy friend? What did you think they were making in that building that you were so disapproving of? Because I heard it was salad bowls. You’re not thinking big. Old people never think big. You think about bowels and breakfast, right? Not bowls and breakfast. Bowels and breakfast. Let me ask you something while I’ve got you here. Is healthy shit supposed to float or sink? I can never remember which is best. Better?”
Prattling away, he knelt beside the dying man, carelessly poking at his chest. Enormous tan clouds rolled across the sky and there was the familiar sound of thunder that brought no rain.
“What’s with your skin anyway? This sort of putrid is not the result of this evening only. You’ve been using the wrong kind of moisturizer. My guess is you were dipping into the paint remover instead of the cocoa butter.” He knelt beside him, sometimes yelling for a little frigging assistance, knowing the situation was beyond all medical intervention.
No one cared about these depressed and misguided elderlies, both dead now. Theirs was not a tragic situation. They were not civilized, no longer even human. Civilization was important. He was all for it. Terrorist assaults on factories and institutions, no matter how deleterious their products and convictions might be, ate away at the very fabric of civilization.
From the dead man’s pocket, he extracted a small leaf of paper tied incomprehensibly with thread.
* * *
—
When I returned from the anteroom, the water Lola sought having slipped through my fingers, she and Gordon had vanished. For a time I lingered, but the wind seemed furious that there was no one to address but me and eventually turned me out.
The world outside the ravaged Institute was not immediately unfamiliar to me though little I’d been told prepared me for the first day without my old people, my familiars. They were flawed and their efforts futile, but living among them when the apocalypse had come and gone, scrubbing the world of grief and love, was what I had been given to know. They had hoped to awaken others, but perhaps we are not meant to awake. Perhaps it is only death’s long instant that arouses us from sleep.
The day was bright, of a boiling intensity. The cataclysmic had been absorbed. Multitudes pressed past me, eager to inhabit a world that would suffice, where emptiness would not be perceived as emptiness. The creatural companions of childhood, even then glimpsed only in zoos and aquariums, would no more have existed here than the griffins and dragons imagined by the ancients.
I passed a theater, derelict behind a chain-link fence, the triangular wire entwined with dead vines. The theater had been called, was still called The Hour, the letters bright as bone. Everyone had a theater like this, in which life went so puzzlingly by, but this had been mine, and it was closed to me, this life was now closed to me.
Beyond The Hour was a park, or a town square, with a single tree, so massive and old that it seemed to me that it had quite forgotten about dying, much like the tree of my youth that believed it would live forever and so inspired the wrath of people. I dimly heard the sea of my infancy, the sound of its waves rolling the rocks as it sought the shore which was not its home, seeking and finding and leaving the shore, again and again. My infancy…a void of dark and voices wordless, and my heart as though bridled, being led forward.
I approached the tree and saw a figure attending to it with great concentration. He held a file. Already a bit of the rough, grooved bark was torn.
“Civilians can’t use power tools,” he informed me easily. “They’re too noisy. There are ordinances against them.”
I could not hear myself remonstrating with him but I heard his replies.
“Not my business to answer why. Ain’t nobody’s business to.”
He poked and pried at the tree with his little file, a vandal working in a semiprofessional capacity.
“We’re pioneers,” he said, “and pioneers have to be unconventional.” He looked upward in the dark branches that blocked out the very sky above us. “This,” he said, “is so conventional.”
I knelt and brushed the scraps of crumpled bark into my hand. It burned, it was searing, and I dropped it. My palm was reddened. In a few moments I could not even bend my fingers or make a fist. But it no longer hurt.
“No no,” he said. “You don’t do that now. You don’t know anything, do you? This is a big undertaking and it don’t like it that it’s found itself to be an undertaking, it don’t like us. Now don’t suck on that hand, you’ll get sick. Trees carry disease and they’re getting meaner. All sorts of stories of them falling on folks, crushing them. They didn’t used to be so nasty when there were more of them. Not like us girls and boys. We don’t get nicer the more of us there are. We’ve exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity and that’s a wondrous thing. Shows we can do anything.”
I picked up the shattered bark and again held it in my hand. It no longer burned.
“You think you’re going to tame that or something? It don’t matter. Tame or wild it’s going down. Your empathies are obsolete. The battle’s over, the world’s been overcome. Almost everything that’s not us or hasn’t been fashioned by us is gone. We’re free to make our own new innocence now.” He feinted at the tree with his file, stabbed it once, then returned the file to
his pocket. “Where’d you come from? If you come from away you’d best go to the courthouse first. Check in as a courtesy. Well it isn’t a courtesy exactly, more a requirement. I would think, anyway, you being from away. Though others go there too. I have to tell you they do not have my sympathy. I think they’re afraid.”
“Where is the courthouse?” I said. Of course I was thinking of Jeffrey and his solemn games.
“Why it’s right over there. Right opposite. You can’t miss it. Some people say there’s a judge in it, just a little fellow, he with whom one has to do, they say. My opinion is he’s not a real judge, he’s just serving in the capacity of a judge. In any case he’s got no right to judge the pioneers.” He looked at me impatiently. “I tell you, this area’s being cleared, tonight, tomorrow, any minute. You can’t stay here.”
“I’ve heard that,” I said.
He nodded.
“I’ve heard that before,” I said.
He scowled at me and stepped away.
* * *
—
Jeffrey was indeed a judge, he had not been thwarted in his aim and he appeared much as he had at the age of ten. His slim, even frail figure was engulfed in the robes he wore.
Usually he would present two similar pictures enlarged upon a screen in his courtroom and say to a frightened defendant, “What are the differences here? There are four. Can you find them?”
The picture was of a man and woman looking at a boat in its cradle in a winter shipyard. A sea was in the distance. There were shrouds on some of the boats, a cloud in the sky.
“You’d be able to know what they’re thinking, those two, if you could find the four differences,” Jeffrey prompted.
The defendants would grow agitated. Four! There were not four differences. There were buds on some of the trees and not others but this was the case in both pictures. In the land of the dead there were many cradles, sure. But why did they care what the man and the woman were thinking? It was no concern of theirs. They weren’t even real as they themselves were real…
But to me he said, “Yours is an interesting case. I’ll dispense with my usual queries.”
“Do you remember when we first met?” I asked. “You had caught that little fish.”
“On a bit of my nail. I had broken off a piece of my fingernail and put it on a hook,” he said. “Let us not discuss the fish.”
“The soul dwells in all things like a fish in the sea, like the sea in a fish,” I suggested.
“That’s no longer the case, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m going to give you a little something to read and then we’ll talk about that instead. This is the story about the hunter Gracchus by Franz Kafka. When Gracchus falls off a precipice in pursuit of his prey, and bleeds to death and dies, he suffers the mishap of not actually dying. His death ship loses its way.”
He handed me some pages and closed his eyes. I could sense how much he loved this room, his robes, the graceful carafe close to hand, the cactus in its little pot, the jury box unpeopled…
I read it carefully. I said, “There’s much that seems unnecessary.”
“Yes, it takes a while to get going, doesn’t it. The hordes of children, the doves, the offal and the fruit skins lying about, the crowds dithering around the waterfront, the awkward floor plan of the yellowish two-storied house…”
“And is it not unnecessary that he is on both a great stair, an infinitely wide and spacious stair between two worlds, all the while he is on a ship, an ark, sailing on earthly waters to earthly ports?” I offered.
“A bark,” Jeffrey said. “The vessel is a bark.”
“A bark, rather.”
“A bark needs winds, an ark not necessarily. What is a chamois?” he asked happily for he remembered with amusement that he knew a chamois as something his grandfather used on the days he washed and waxed his great dark car, a proud and powerful machine so like his grandfather.
“A small goat-like antelope of Europe.”
“You must forget such replies,” he said. “I was only teasing.”
“When Gracchus first awakens on his bier in the room where he’s been taken, he forgets his situation,” I said formally, unbothered by my student role. One should ever be a student of unfulfillable promise after all. “Then he remembers everything. The mishap, his constant wandering, the ports and towns, the official greeters and questioners, the indifference and incuriosity of everyone else. He remembers because he has not been dead always. Rather he is dead dead dead as he says, but in a certain sense, alive.”
Jeffrey regarded his hands and nipped at one of the nails, a habit he could not break.
“An interesting case, isn’t it?” he said. “Now let us read the fragment. I like fragments. Sometimes I prefer them to the whole.”
He handed me further pages entitled “The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment.”
The copy was faint. I could barely make anything out. Briefly I saw the words “Leviathan world” but then I did not. The phrase had vanished. It was as though the page had momentarily desired to accommodate my need but then had withdrawn. I read more easily now but with less assurance.
“What do you think?” Jeffrey asked.
“Nothing further is revealed here,” I replied. “The questioner is no longer an official greeter but a businessman who boards the ship out of curiosity. He seems most intent on informing Gracchus that no one thinks about him, that he is not a subject that is discussed.”
“Is that true? Why would this be so?”
“Because thinking about him resolves nothing. Because life is brief. It’s as much as one can do just to get oneself through it. That’s one of the explanations provided, anyway.”
“What does the questioner, this curiosity-seeker, want here, anyway?”
“Coherence. A coherent story.”
“And Gracchus mocks him for that, doesn’t he. What does Gracchus want?” He took the pages from me and placed them on a shelf.
“To no longer have to endlessly question his situation. To no longer be an exception.”
“What are the differences?”
“Between coherence and exception?”
“Between you and Gracchus.”
“Gracchus is an invention of the writer Kafka.”
“Perhaps not a pure invention,” Jeffrey said. “Perhaps he adapted it from an old story, an old folk tale.”
I felt the story was revelatory while being impossible to interpret. “Gracchus’s death is incomplete,” I offered. “In my situation it is my birth.”
“No, no,” he said. “I see that you were born and quite without difficulty. Something did happen after forty days, it’s true, but you weren’t gone long enough to make any real difference. Maybe you’re a little more sensitive to loss. A bit more…incompatible. Are you suggesting that birth did not prepare you for life? How long did you stay in that place?”
“Until they left. They all left. Do you know what became of them?”
“What became of them?” he repeated, astonished. He shuddered remembering that place, so without form or spiritual industry. “Is this all you remember of your death?”
“I don’t remember my death.”
“You were a non-experiencer then possibly, which is just a psychological defense mechanism of depersonalization.” He grimaced. “Sometimes this loathsome cant just grabs me by the throat and tries to throttle…” He put on an aloof expression.
“I would like to take up living rather than remembering,” I said. “I would like to take up the art of living for the first time.”
“The art of living? You mean the work of living. No one takes up such labors for the first time.”
But, he assured me, should he find in my favor, matters would be very different. The recipe would be changed. Not that he slavishly followed the recipe—he was no cookbook judge ever mix
ing the stale ingredients of precedent, principle and policy. He could interpret, over-apply when he so fancied. He could apply via the Mischief Rule. The Mischief Rule was a kick.
He dismissed me abruptly then. He told me to come back tomorrow.
I turned and was surprised to see that the courtroom was full of people, and the gallery as well. Had they been there all the while I was laboring over the hunter Gracchus? I blushed and hurried out. The door to the structure was narrowly tall and red. It was two doors actually, which met in a thin crease, so thin you could scarcely put a playing card between them.
I was not surprised that it was the child Jeffrey I had so soon encountered upon my emergence in the outside world. I had slipped into conversation with him as easily as Gracchus had into his winding sheet, like a girl into her marriage dress. I had not been discomfited because I believed I was still receiving instruction, but I now realized that further instruction might not be forthcoming.
Gracchus’s story was without dignity or beauty, not that the author was obligated to traffic in such matters. It was artificial, preposterous, inconclusive, a game of meanings that could not be won. It demanded its opposite, the other story, its foil, its righteous adversary.
“Pilgrim!” a woman called to me from the shadows the building cast. “Pilgrim!” she called, amused.
“Are you to come back tomorrow as well?” I asked.
“No. He did not tell me to come back tomorrow.”
“You’re not his mother, are you?” I asked, recalling for an instant the old brusque bored glamor of Barbara.
“He’s convinced our paths have never crossed before. ‘Hath the earth a mother?’ he asked me. ‘Why do you want to cause so much trouble?’ I said. ‘Hath the rain a father?’ he said, cool as can be.”
Away from the square and the immense tree dripping dark was the brilliant shadeless shameless day. On the wide congested boulevard, a long car, a hearse, inched past.
“That thing always seems to be passing by,” Barbara said. She pointed to a wad of pink chewing gum glistening on the fender. “And isn’t that so humorous with those people inside, taking everything so seriously and not knowing it’s there.”