by Bruce Wagner
The cow would be slaughtered, then burned with cedarwood (the mightiest of trees—HOPE), hyssop (because it grew in crevices—FAITH) and “crimson stuff” (from the scarlet worm—CHARITY) added to the fire. The ashes were to be mixed with living water, not stagnant, then sprinkled over the unclean—all in addition to immersion. That’s what it took to emerge tahor. This particular law of Torah was one of four that remained unfathomable to even the most faithful of interpretants, the others being: marrying one’s brother’s widow; not mingling wool and linen in a garment; performing the rites of the scapegoat.
She put on the brown Armani her mother had bought for her birthday. To calm herself, Rachel recited the laws. When a wife entered the niddah state, she and her husband could not touch. They could not comb each other’s hair, nor could they brush lint from each other’s clothes. They couldn’t even hand objects to one another, a small child being the rare exception. They were forbidden to sit together on a sofa unless another person—or, say, cushion—was set between them. They may not pour each other drinks, nor should a husband eat or drink from his wife’s leftovers, though she could eat from his. If the husband didn’t know the leftovers were hers, it was all right for him to eat. If someone ate from his wife’s leftovers first or the leftovers were transferred to another plate, the husband could eat them too, as long as the wife had left the room. While she was unclean, he was not to sit on his wife’s bed, smell her perfume or listen to the sound of her singing….
They drove through a phalanx of paparazzi at the cemetery gate.
This, the green freeway-bound park where her father was laid.
It was Calliope’s genius to stage a reunion via this ballyhooed alternative event. The psychiatrist was a public figure of sorts, a bit-player perennial in the media drama—she would upstage the cantor (with a little help from Oberon), as he had upstaged her in that shattered time. She wanted him to feel her feathers as she swept past his table with the VIPs. Yes: it seemed to take forever but now all the bodies were in their proper place. Mother and daughter could have their mikvah.
Donny Ribkin and Zev Turtletaub said hello. They were joined by Katherine Grosseck. Calliope said she was glad to finally meet the real McCoy, and Katherine quickly filled Zev in on the impersonator scandale. Then the screenwriter said: How can I be sure you’re the real Calliope? “By her hourly fee,” said Donny, and everyone laughed. More jokes were made, belaboring the theme of the double. Before they broke off, Donny said he and Katherine were a couple again. Calliope offered congratulations. Zev said they were together only because Katherine’s directing career needed jump-starting.
“Donny Ribkin was a patient of yours,” said Rachel, reiterating what she’d already been told. She felt a bond with the agent, an illicit kinship.
“Not any longer. Not for months.”
“Did he—does he know about Sy…and his mother?”
She nodded. “Just recently. He called to say he found her diaries.”
“Well, didn’t he think it a little strange? I mean, that you were the wife of the man that his mother was—”
“Of course, he thought it was strange. It is strange.”
“I just can’t see how—how you ever could have agreed to see him as a patient, Mother. Knowing that—”
“I made a choice, Rachel. Doctors make choices.”
Rachel felt like making a choice of her own: to kick off her heels and sprint up the hill to the Mount of Olives, where the cantor awaited. She had cedarwood in her purse, and minty hyssop too—a small fire would be kindled at grave. She would perform the rites of the scapegoat while Aztec laborers shut off tractors, respectfully turning away.
Leslie Trott shook hands like it was a collagen convention. Calliope was always pushing her daughter to see him. A few years ago, Rachel gave in, but the emperor was overbooked. She wound up in a distant room, far from Big Star country—the Mount of Olives suite—where a dull colleague cheerily burned off a minuscule nostril wart.
“How long did you see Obie, as a shrink?”
“A year. A very troubled girl.”
“Isn’t it…inappropriate for you to be here?”
“I don’t know where you get your ethical bulletins from, Rachel, but no. I’m a human being. I dance at weddings and I cry at funerals.”
“You haven’t cried yet. Did you visit her in the hospital?”
“Yes. She couldn’t speak. At least, I couldn’t understand her. She mostly blinked her eyes. The doctors said she knew what had happened to her—the mind apparently wasn’t affected.”
Rachel was startled to learn the Big Star was a Jew. She couldn’t help wondering who prepared her for burial. In her mind, she saw the sexpot legs guided through Donna Karan pjs, silken string twisted nine times at the waist, then looped into the letter shin, which stood for God—though, at time of death, she was probably already clean as a whistle. When you’re rich and paralyzed like that, private nurses were always sponging you down.
“You look too thin, Rachel.”
“I feel fine.”
“But are you? I worry—”
Rachel silenced her with a hug. Only a month ago, such a gesture would have been unthinkable for either one.
Calliope pointed out the mother of the deceased, a mountain of a woman who looked slightly deranged. Her enormous bosom heaved in laughter and tears at Leslie Trott’s words. Eventually, he eulogized only to her and the grievers blushed to be privy to such intimacies.
They drove to the beach, north on PCH to points unknown. The sky looked like the bottom of an old porcelain bowl. When the rain began, it felt like the end of the world.
Calliope smiled dreamily. “We used to make this drive all the time, remember? San Simeon, Big Sur, Point Lobos…Do you remember what Sy used to sing?”
“We’re off to see the Wizard!—”
“And Simon—what was that crazy song…”
“‘Hit the road, Jack…’”
Together: “‘And don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more!’”
They laughed and sang some more.
“Well, how far should we go?”
“Till we run out of gas.”
“Thelma and Louise.”
“You know, she’s a client—or was, for a while.”
“Thelma or Louise?”
“Geena—whichever one she was.”
The rain stopped. They got burgers and fries at a roadside place and crossed to the beach. Calliope had a blanket in the trunk. They spread it on a picnic table and faced the frothy gray-green tubes.
“This is nice,” her mother said.
“Mama,” said Rachel, plaintively. “I can’t stop washing—since I found out—about Father…and then there was this—this horrible thing—a little girl—this tumah—we washed her—and this whole—and, and the red heifer!” She laughed, then sobbed with great embarrassing snorts. “I don’t know, Mama! I think I’m going crazy!”
Calliope clasped her daughter’s hands and looked deep in her eyes, like a hypnotist. “Rachel, you are not. It’s just terribly sad and terribly confusing…”
“Well, I’ve been acting pretty strangely lately! Maybe I should—be—on an antidepressant or something.”
“We can certainly investigate that. You wouldn’t be the first.”
“I don’t know if anything will help.”
“Just talking about it helps—a lot. Believe me.”
“Oh yeah?” she said, sweetly chiding. “How would you know?”
“I have a little bit of experience in that area.”
Rachel shook her head tearfully. “Everything is a tumah—”
“What is this tumah, darling?”
“Mama, I can’t get clean! Haven’t you ever felt like that?”
“‘Out, out, damn spot,’” she intoned, like a schoolteacher. “But there is no blood on your hands, Rachel! There just isn’t. You know, sometimes there’s a difference between the truth and what a child perceives to be that truth.
”
“Mama…did you know there’s a moth that feeds off the tears of elephants? Human tears, too—I read about it in National Geographic. It pokes the poor thing’s eye just so it can drink the tears. What kind of world would have such a thing?”
“Darling, please—”
“And there’s a bug—they call it a burying beetle. It digs the ground out from under dead things and buries them. I saw a picture of one, digging the grave for a mourning dove…” Rachel stood, unable to go on. She wanted to throw herself in the water, but her mother chased her down and held fast.
“No, baby! No!” she shouted as Rachel seized with tears, straining toward the maliciously indifferent surf. Calliope steered her back to the car, cloaking the frail, shivering shoulders in the blanket as if she were a princess—a mourning dove—who had launched her dead on a floating litter, toward unforgiving seas.
Ursula Sedgwick
When Taj Wiedlin hanged himself, Ursula took it as a sign for her to go. She went to Travel Shoppe and booked a deluxe sleeper—that’s what Sara did when she visited her mom. Ursula wouldn’t have felt safe on the road. She never got around to fixing the Bonneville, and besides, it was too big a target. They changed trains in Portland and began the journey east.
The cars were uncrowded. Ursula befriended a porter, a kind, fiftyish Captain Kangaroo—looking man. He was married, from Red Wing.
“Chanhassen,” he echoed, a little unsure, then scratched his head. “That’s a suburb—boy, I should know that place. Relatives there?”
“Sort of. What’s the weather like now?”
“Well, it’s going to be a pretty hot Fourth of July, I’ll tell you. June, July and August are generally humid.”
“My friend told me Bob Dylan was from Minnesota.”
“Hibbing. Oh, we have many famous people. Loni Anderson, Roger Maris, the rock singer Prince—though my daughter tells me he doesn’t call himself that anymore.” Samson shifted in his sleep. “Lots of writers, too,” said the porter. “Sinclair Lewis—he wrote Main Street—and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby.”
“They made a movie out of that.”
“Sure did. That was Mia Farrow. There’s a woman who’s had nine lives.”
“And nine children, at least.”
The porter thought that was funny. With a glance at the baby, he asked about her husband. Ursula said she was separated. “That’s a shame,” he said, tickling Samson’s neck with a finger. “You’re a pretty one, aren’t you?”
“He’s actually a boy.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—never could tell them apart, even my own. You know, you really ought to go to one of the fairs while you’re there. Best in the world. And come the Fourth…”
“County fairs?”
“Granddaddies of ’em all! Oh my, I’d guess St. Paul has the biggest fairgrounds in the whole country. There’s Forest Lake, Pine City, the Cokato Corn Carnival. ‘Princess Kay of the Milky Way’—that’s a beauty pageant. Win, and they carve your face in butter.”
“I’m not so sure I’d like that.”
“When I was a boy, they had midways: sideshows and tattooed ladies, weird stuff in formaldehyde jars. Things are a bit different now—well, they’re a lot different. Biggest entertainers in the world come by to sing. Garth Brooks, Tony Bennett. Anyone you can think of.”
“Maybe I’ll take my friend’s mother. She lives in St. Cloud.”
“Oh, she’ll take you—we don’t like to miss our fairs. She’ll have you baking cakes and riding a greased pig.”
“Well,” Ursula said, standing with the sleepy boy in her arms, “I guess we’ll be taking a nap.”
“He’s got a head start on you.”
“It’s contagious.”
The bottle fell from the seat to the ground and the porter retrieved it. “That’s a real pretty watch,” he said, noticing it on the thin wrist as he handed the bottle back.
“It was a gift—an unexpected one.”
“Best kind. Anyhow, you go ahead now. I hope I haven’t talked your ear off.”
“No, I liked it. Hope you’ll talk some more.”
“You just let me know if you need anything,” he said, “with the baby and all. I’ll bring you dinner in your berth, if you like.”
Ursula weaved the clacking way back to their compartment. She locked the door behind her, closed the shades and lay down with Samson. They were still in Montana, with Malta, Glasgow and Wolf Point to go—then Williston, Stanley, Minot, Rugby, Devil’s Lake, Grand Forks…St. Cloud. Sara’s mom’s was the third stop into Minnesota. Ursula thought maybe she would just drop the baby off. She’d been so full of hope at the start of the trip, sure that the Mahanta would meet her at the Temple because of her tragedy—then certain he’d lay healing hands on Samson’s eyes and help him see. Now, the bottom had dropped out. What arrogance! Hadn’t her friend said the Mahanta wasn’t well? Who did she think she was with her false charity and selfish expectations, her profane misjudgment of the Light and Sound of God? Sri Harold Klemp was not put on this planet to lay hands on anyone, let alone at their convenience. She’d been so controlling; it was time to let go. There was nothing to do but fall asleep and hope the Living ECK Master would guide her.
She dreamed of her daughter. Tiffany waited at the Temple of Golden Wisdom and told her mother to follow. “Once you’re here,” she said, “we’ll cry a river of tears. And when our tears dry up, we’ll come back to Earth to live again.” When Ursula awakened, it was night. She went and found the porter.
“Well, that must have been a good nap.”
“Is it too late for supper?”
“I kept yours warm,” he said, with a wink. “I’ll bring it to your room.”
She stood between sleeper cars, and the cold bit the tops of her cheeks. A man passed through and nodded. Ursula thought she saw a vast body of water out there in the dark. She wondered about it—too early for Devil’s Lake. She looked at the watch the woman from the mortuary gave her that day in Century City. It was a Tiffany: that’s how Ursula knew her daughter was reaching out. They belonged together, and now was the time. If they did return to Earth like she said in the dream (Ursula secretly hoped they would journey to a different plane), her only wish was to be far away from all the people and places that had hurt them. She stuck out her wind-clipped head and inhaled. How nice it would be to start fresh, to come back as anonymous passengers on a train—or summer cotton-candy eaters at a county fair.
Ursula smiled, raising her leg with its flowery tennis shoe atop the steel half-door. Princess Kay of the Milky Way, ha! hoisting herself up, Mama, come!—
Faces carved in butter.
Perry Needham Howe
It turned out to be old-fashioned appendicitis. When the doctor said there was something else, Perry got the gooseflesh: he didn’t want to know. No, listen, said the doc, the nodules shrank, saw it on the pre-op X ray, plain as day. Little buggers were practically gone from the left lung altogether. But what did that mean? Naturally, the doc didn’t know. Was it a good thing? he asked, animatedly cautious. Yes, said the doc, it was definitely a good thing. Then Perry pulled back emotionally because he didn’t want to get sucker-punched—that’s what cancer liked to do, ambush for a living. He asked what they were supposed to do now, and the doc said nothing, nothing to do but “follow it,” eyes peeled, ears to ground. The producer giddily theorized he was making so much money even the cancer was intimidated and the two men shared a nicely cathartic moment of comic relief. Perry asked if he was still going to die, a bullshitty question but he wanted to know. It’s a good question, said the doc. Then he gave him the trusty Zen of Common Sense standby, the old listen-whatever-you’ve-been-doing-don’t-stop-because-you’re-doing-something-right speech. When the doc left, Perry got on the phone to his wife.
Rachel brought mail and a videocassette to the hospital. She looked terrible. When Perry asked what was wrong, she broke down and confessed—she never returned the watch. She gave it away to
a homeless person instead. Perry was further confounded when she handed him a personal check for fifteen hundred dollars, less than half the cost of the misappropriated item. She wanted to know if he would be kind enough to deduct the balance from her bi-monthly paychecks—unless, of course, he wished to prosecute. Rachel said she was prepared for that. When he pressed her to explain, she fled in tears.
Perry popped the “Calibre 89” into the VCR, perusing the cover.
Calibre 89
THE MOST COMPLICATED WATCH IN THE WORLD
Total development time: 9 years
(Research and development 5 years—manufacture 4 years).
Total diameter. 88.2 mm. Total thickness: 41 mm.
Total weight: 1100 grams Case: 18 ct. gold
Number of components: 1728, including 184 wheels—61 bridges—
332 screws—415 pins—68 springs
429 mechanical parts—126 jewels—2 main dials
24 hands—8 display dials.
The two-sided Patek denoted the time the sun rose and set; the date of Easter; the season, solstice, zodiac and equinox. There was an alarm too—when the carillon of its “grande sonnerie” sounded, the melody was nothing short of an especially composed theme of some sixteen notes. A pinion drove an astral map with a night sky that, thanks to a “modern method of gold evaporation under vacuum,” was able to show twenty-five hundred stars grouped in eighty-eight constellations. This supreme mechanism (forty-eight thousand man hours in the making) was even a thermometer. The tape showed its works in micro-, fetishized detail; one of the satellite wheels depicted within took four hundred years to make a single revolution.
“Where’s Harold Lloyd?”
The sprightly old man from down the hall peeked through the door at the monitor. “Well, hey there. How you doin’ today, Severin?” He freeze-framed while his visitor took a closer view of the enlarged cog.
“Where’s Harold Lloyd?” he demanded. “Didn’t you ever see Safety Last?”