by Joy Williams
He had been sing-songing to himself, having recently discovered the struggling field of animal law. “Animal use law prohibits any necropsy or surgical procedure on an animal within the sight of other animals of the same species,” he warbled, which was interesting, really interesting in that it acknowledged the distress and empathy of animals over…
“What?” he said.
“I believe the disagreement between your father and your grandfather was over procedural rather than substantive matters,” she said, making every effort to present it in a way he’d appreciate.
When he said nothing, she said, “Your father will probably get off on the self-defense gambit, for your grandfather did brandish a stone paperweight at him.”
“Which stone paperweight,” Jeffrey said.
“What a funny question. It’s practically inappropriate.”
“He has many stone paperweights.” Any rock can become metamorphic, his tata had told him.
“Well perhaps he had.”
“Take it back what you said.”
“Don’t be difficult, Jeffrey. There’s nothing Mother can do about it. Now you know what’s what and we have to get back to what’s what.”
He was silent.
“Jeffrey,” his mother said, “don’t play with your thoughts.”
He had seized the wheel then. His mother screamed and, struggling with him, quite naturally lost control of the vehicle which rolled and rolled as though it were a perfect orb designed to roll forever before it cast him out to stand alone on a dark road…
Jeffrey’s head was pounding. He must be dehydrated. He poured water from the carafe into a shallow cup and studied it for a moment before gulping it down. The Greeks had their psychomanteums which were oracles of the dead appearing as visions in pools or certain pans of water. He’d never been granted such a vision, not as much as a peek. He had to be content with the constant revelation that most of what passed as the substance of life was nothing. Still, he found the psychomanteum a somewhat attractive notion. Maybe he wasn’t giving it enough time.
For a while as a child he had harbored the notion that when someone you were fond of died, it was yourself who disappeared. It began with his grandmother. She must have been baffled when everyone and everything she’d surrounded herself with vanished—her brilliant husband, her frivolous son and his awful wife—right down to her wispy grandson, her pet koi and the wedding ring she was always taking off and misplacing when she washed the dishes.
It was yourself who disappeared, the one who was supposed to be left, and you were never that person again.
He could hear the crowd below him multiplying. Really, he was falling further and further behind. Sometimes he tried to perceive them all as sacred clowns—holding nothing sacred, they point the way to the sacred.
But he could not do this often. Practically never.
The sound was quite extraordinary.
He remembered the description in an old book of a phenomenon long since vanished from the world, the sound of birds, of migrating wings passing through the darkness in countless armies with a velvety rustle long drawn out.
This was not that.
It was a rumbling metallic demanding cacophony, murderously sociable, pathologically multiplying.
He rushed down to them in a rage and did a week’s work in an hour before retreating once more to his chambers, feeling a bit off his game. His tata always allowed his opponent to state his whole case, making sure the other had nothing more to say before the implacable rejoinder came. His tata was a man made of dynamite! He spoke and suddenly everything was inverted, all previous certainties were made questionable, everything reasonably argued preposterous. His irrefutable triumph was thrilling to observe, a magic show, a pure confoundment…
He allowed himself a moment of wild adoration for the old man, then several more resigning his father to ever deeper hells.
But Jeffrey was not his grandfather, alas, and the interesting case was not an opponent. His divine opposite, perhaps, his challenge and check. She saw the tears in things which he did not; he saw only the injustice. Every person under his purview considered themselves unique as snowflakes but in the aggregate they were a blizzard, a whiteout of swirling expectation and denial. Yet still the rumor in his courtroom was that if his opinion was favorable, one should have no fear, if unfavorable, no hope. Which was pretty darn flattering to overhear, praise practically.
The truth of the matter was his judgments scarcely varied.
Scarcely do we inhume the wreckage of our lives than we dig it up again. That is why we keep on and keep on and keep on, never progressing except in the grossest and most mundane fashion, he would sometimes confide.
And then she appears and says she wants to take up the work of living for the first time!
Art of living, she’d actually said, which he corrected. She was thinking without the right words. She should just go to the next step of thinking with no words at all. He was able to do this on occasion, though the moment always caught him unaware, and he found it wonderfully refreshing and instructive. That was no way to explain it of course.
His masters had brought them together, but were they her masters as well? If they were, he thought somewhat anxiously, they might be requiring more of her than of him. Sometimes he wondered if they were even following his labors anymore, if the minute distinctions he did make were of any concern to them.
What if she were the world’s last night? Isn’t that the great theological question—what if this present were the world’s last night? Or one of the great questions, anyway, those who cared had so many of them.
But the governing authority, of which his court was very much not a part, was taking increasing measures to eliminate night. Instinctively if not metaphysically, they sensed a final reckoning and determined, being sovereign and all, that they would not be out-reckoned. Unnatural light would suffuse the all as soon as natural light began to wane. That was the assurance and the goal. Night generated unhealthy thinking anyway. And they found that people had no trouble sleeping without darkness, they’d be sleeping anyway, in the most profound sense they were always sleeping.
Even she slept, he suspected. For she couldn’t remember her death! Which had been given to her for a purpose, after all. She was a human child. She wasn’t born in a buttercup. She had endured the brief and starving banality of one of those last childhoods before eluding the great attrition and corresponding exculpatory resolve of the survivors, before being cosseted by brooding over-the-hill eco-nuts whose concern for the tusked and shelled, the finned and winged, made them the shame of their species and more outcast than any Azazel goat of the Hebrews. And now she was here, the last of her kind, or the first—the difficulties being the same—having realized her situation only when she became alone, when her familiars had vanished with the vanquished world.
But what was the point of coming back from the dead if only to visit the dead…
He tidied the papers on his desk once more. There were no dogs in the Kafka story. He wondered what else he’d been wrong about.
He resumed staring into the dish of water. There was a small insect there, a spider imperceptibly translucent, floating not on the water but seemingly on an invisible film above it. It puzzled him, for the sterility of his chambers he had never questioned. It puzzled him for he could not ever remember seeing a spider before, which surely was impossible.
The spider brings the web out of herself and then lives in it.
Remarkable.
* * *
—
The youth flagged Nolo down. “Your grille’s all smashed in, you hit something?” he asked eagerly.
“You want me to hit you?”
“There’s someone loitering in the park, won’t leave, won’t talk. I think she’s an enemy of humanity,” he said somberly.
“Y
eah? Why?”
“She had that look.”
Nolo regarded him. He was a fool. They were making more and more fools. The factory never quit, the machine never broke down, just kept stamping and spitting them out. “That’s extremely helpful,” he said. “Anything else?”
“She looked like she was waiting on somebody, some time for it to be or something.”
“You’re being remarkably detailed in the most helpful way. Have you ever considered a career in enforcement?”
“Yeah!” the youth said. “You gonna make her leave? Can I come with you?”
“Actually,” Nolo said, “she’d have to be hurt, injured in some way, at death’s door, about to greet the pale summoner, to warrant my presence.”
“You’re not going to ask her to explain herself?”
“If I were to ask her anything, I’d say, ‘Would you have wanted to change anything, dear?’ ”
“ ‘Dear!’ ” he exclaimed. “I tried to talk to her but she didn’t say jack to nothing. I tell you she was weird.”
“If she’s still there tomorrow I’ll take a look.”
“If you make her leave I bet she’d have no place to go. I was looking like I wasn’t paying attention but I was observing her closely. She looked like she could only see the black side of our works, our institutions and convictions.”
“Our works, institutions and convictions,” Nolo said, amused. “You’re a bold little brat, aren’t you.”
“I mean no disrespect of course. I just meant she looked homeless, uncomfortable, not on board. Like I mentioned, she didn’t say nothing. She didn’t have language like.”
“When it’s a matter of death, the dream speaks another language.”
“I don’t like substitutions. Everything in a dream is a substitution, right? It’s your unconscious. I never dream but a couple nights ago I see this horse banging around in my apartment and he crashes through the door and into the hall and out the window and I see it all broken and smashed up on the street below. I live a couple stories up and I felt kind of sorry for it but it looked kind of stupid down there too.”
“That is not a propitious dream,” Nolo said admiringly.
“The unconscious life is not worth living in my opinion,” the youth said. “I don’t believe in the unconscious life.”
“Really my friend, the prognosis for you is not good.”
“The horse is me, you’re saying.”
“No, no, of course not,” Nolo said, quite impressed by the boy’s utter ignorance. He wanted to put him in a headlock and pound him pulpy. “It’s worse than that even, it’s what you could have been.”
“Yeah,” the youth scoffed. “Something crazy-frightened, unhinged, in the wrong environment.”
Nolo felt irritable once more. He no longer wanted to pound him pulpy, he wanted to find him so disposed and kneel to piously administer his useless nostrums. Then just as suddenly he felt kindly and grievously toward him, as toward his own child, one he’d commandeered from a pup.
“Look,” he said, “you’re interrupting me. I got a place I got to go.”
“It’s one emergency situation after another I bet. They’re getting more and more stupendous, aren’t they? I want to do triage. I want to specialize in it. That’s what I’m angling for. You’re not gonna catch me out on the smoking oceans checking drops of seawater for signs of life, I’m not the monitoring kind.”
“No,” Nolo said, fascinated. The air felt like soup that he was being forced to eat. His eyes stung as though he’d finally lost immunity to the toxins of life, his life, all the while this youth, this product, was talking easily, confidently on.
“Yeah, triage. I’m going to specialize in priorities, transitions. A horse dumb enough to suicide out of a fourth-floor window isn’t going to be high on my list.”
“No time for the beasts of the world, naturally,” Nolo said.
“That’s right. Neither the actual ones or the not-me’s either. Isn’t that what you said my dream meant?”
“Many have that dream,” Nolo said.
The boy reddened. “I’m just saying the one in the park warrants your attention or harassment at least. People should pay to regard that tree if that’s all they’re doing. The crazy ones should pay.”
“So that’s what she’s doing? Regarding the tree, nothing else? That tree’s going to be removed tomorrow, you know.”
“I thought it was soon! Any day I’ve been thinking for a while now, any day! It’s a big old sucker.”
“Yes it is.”
“I thought there was going to be an announcement, so we could all partake of history.”
“I’m the announcement. You’ve heard the announcement from me.”
“It’ll be the last of the shit that’s come before,” the youth said with some awe.
* * *
—
Nolo parked and made his way to Denver’s door. The ground was noxious and damp, just as it always was. Bad for his boots. Inside there was nothing but the television, the walls around the squat appliance soiled from the drinks and food Denver had gotten into the habit of throwing in irritation at what he had chosen to watch. Denver’s meals had been flagrantly unhealthy, Sonoran hot dogs, gravy fries, cheesy noodles. He was a devotee of two-for-one offers. This is going to expire tomorrow, he would say troubled, clutching some wrinkled coupon. But Denver had an ascetic streak as well and what he’d died of was disgust. Disgust assisted by drugs. Disgust abetted by too much reading of unfashionable tragedies and newly acquired Six Step ambitions.
First you seek, he told Nolo. You gotta want to seek. You can’t cease the seeking. Then you find. But that’s not enough, it doesn’t stop there. After finding you have to suffer great disturbance, psychological disturbance. Some people can’t get past this one. They’re stuck, lost, they flip out. If you can withstand disturbance there comes amazement. This is very cool and transformative. Then comes total control of yourself and your perceptions. Then the final step, the culmination…rest.
Nolo thought it was a lot to go through just to reach rest, or repose, as Denver said sometimes. Repose sounded even worse.
But Nolo would grant that the Six Step required industrial-strength integrity and he’d never thought his friend had that much integrity. But sometimes it comes down to integrity vs. survival, does it not?
In any case, Denver had found his repose. He was gone and the chair he’d been sprawled in. His books were gone, too, those dirty paperback tragedies he’d so adored.
The big screen possessed a faint glow, waiting for the next tenancy. When his mother died he hadn’t been in the room. He’d been at the hospital but on a different floor, having just brought in one of those tiresome oldsters who were trying to save the planet, last of the pelicans he thought of them as, trying to revive what they loved with their own blood. His mother was dead on a narrow bed and they’d left the heart monitor on beside her showing its green straight line and he’d thought it cruel. It was probably policy, it was most assuredly policy to provide this ultimate assurance of a change in station and he had seen it hundreds of times but it surprised him here next to his mother and it offended him and he thought it cruel.
Nolo sat cross-legged on the floor. It was not quiet here. The sounds of sirens, traffic, screams and laughter slipped through the walls though the walls were not thin, they were ugly cement blocks, the place was a sealed fortress in appearance only. The youth in the park had depressed him. Heartless little turd. The harrow had initially been perceived as brutally and blithely indiscriminate, but further studies indicated that those it spared were rigidly optimistic, uninhibited and chary of any devotion. Kid was a perfect specimen. The profile was holding up pretty well as people rushed to embrace those characteristics to prove their own legitimacy. Of course studies were always shifting, changing, coming up with some new
angle, affirming the opposite of what they’d just assured everyone about. Now it was being discovered that some were prone to dying from the harrow’s requirements after being initially spared. He believed that Denver was now of that number. He had become too sensitive, in his fashion, to continue if not necessarily thrive. Actually no one was expected to thrive.
The one that brat in the park had gotten so twisted up about, he was going to leave her alone. He wasn’t going to investigate. What would he question her about anyway? People pass through. That’s all they do really. She was probably gone now, gone to the coast with all the streaming others, the sea, as though the sea hadn’t already happened.
Nolo wanted to remain in this emptied room. He didn’t want to go back. Stillness. Focus. Do not recollect. Do not desire. You’re the messenger, Denver had said, and it wasn’t the first time. He was always saying stuff like that. Be the messenger. And he was. This was what he was. But he wasn’t the message.
* * *
—
The mayor had been having the most godawful dreams. Not dreams exactly, more like nightmares. Though not nightmares as much as a sensation that he was being torn limb from limb.
He didn’t understand it. His job was not that stressful. It was an honorary position though he was allowed the courtesy of a few pronouncements. He’d once been—God it seemed a lifetime ago—a salesman. And a brilliant one, he could sell a shock collar to a Doberman, though he dealt in vehicles. He could spot a moral hazard a mile away and was expert at taking full advantage of the situation. Poor bastard would default on payments causing his credit rating which was no less than his very being to be ruined, initiating a cascade of torment by steroidal bounty hunters with Tasers and Flameless Expulsion Grenades in their butt-packs.