by Rick Moody
The television has been fired up again, and those who are able are on their way into the common area, where Rosa imagines she can hear the sound of the theme song of one of those programs that does nothing but show police in the midst of making arrests. There is a brownie in Rosa’s hand. How did she come to acquire a brownie? Rosa shoves the entire brownie into her mouth. From nowhere, her daughter appears, having brought her some clothes from home. Her daughter is a hazard coming down the corridor, and her daughter represents the flood of language. This is a corridor of perils. Her daughter comes to rest, as though made inert by her, Rosa Elisabetta Meandro, somewhere not far from the door to her bedroom, the room she shares with the slumbering obese woman who will one day awake.
“How are you feeling?” Vanessa asks.
She has made a provisional decision not to deploy the moisture arguments from her moisture ducts, but she is not in a position to make these tactical decisions, so the best Rosa can do when faced with the ambulatory memories represented by a black raincoat and its contents is to avoid comment on the moisture arguments in the hopes that they will soon abate. Or perhaps she can blame the moisture arguments on environmental insults. Too many days indoors with not enough stimulation and no exercise, and moisture arguments are involuntarily activated in the presence of the possibility of human kindness. She attempts rictus, that simple arrangement of muscle groups, but she is not sure if this offering is transmitted properly. Vanessa looks harried, as if she can’t believe what she’s seeing, and Rosa Elisabetta is perhaps, in some register, prepared for the fact that her daughter might not be able to believe in this place.
“Food any good?” Vanessa asks, and reaches out to touch a spot on Rosa’s face, which is a residual brownie mottling site, and Vanessa harvests the residual brownie accumulation. Vanessa laughs. Rosa believes that the laughing is meant to indicate that it is widely understood that the food in hospitals is not good. This is known as a rhetorical question.
“Can we sit in there?” And without waiting to hear if that is an acceptable place for maximal cushioning, Vanessa takes her mother’s arm, and they are heading back toward the dining room, even though there are residual smells. Time has shellacked the walls of the dining room with the debased categories of hospital food. Even during those hours when you are not eating, there is the smell of what you have eaten, as though it is part of the history of the place, a history of smells. The conversation is under way once Rosa is conscious of its being under way, which is after it has already begun. Vanessa is talking quickly and introducing many practical issues and much repetition of key concepts, but Rosa doesn’t follow ideas easily, and by the time she comprehends one, Vanessa is already well onto the next, like she hears something about the idea of aftercare and something about long-term rehabilitation, and these things make her want to spill out of her pouch, and her pouch is still churning when Vanessa is telling Rosa what the doctor told her, a sequence of words connoting lengths of incarceration that she cannot fathom at the moment, and this is when she misses the part about the physical, Vanessa saying that the physical, something something, something, like a song Rosa can’t remember, and colitis as an expression of alcohol abuse, and Rosa just winces at all of it, she just begins to fold into a wincing interval.
“You’ve got a few more days, that’s what they think, and then we have to find somewhere else to put you. Because I can’t keep bringing you here. They don’t want you here anymore unless you’re going to agree to go somewhere else. Do you understand what I’m saying? So we’re going to have to find some rehabilitation place.”
With a lecturer, there is some kind of critical layering of key concepts, so that they began to mulch and fertilize, but with her daughter, there’s no layering, which means that the critical concepts are unjustified, or perhaps imported from a safe zone, which brings about further involuntary moisture arguments, and these are accompanied by a resignation in the mucous musculature, and this prompts Vanessa to take the name of the Lord in vain and to go rooting through her combination bag and sack.
“What do you expect? You’re sick. What do you expect me to do? Because I leave you at home, and then you start barricading the door and you’re not eating. And you practically kill the cat. And I have a job, and it’s really hard for me to do my job and to make enough money to make sure that the mortgage is paid on the building, and then I have to come back home and worry about whether you’re dead. And I know that you don’t exactly feel like you understand me, Ma, but I love you just the same. Haven’t I stayed to keep an eye on you? I have. I stayed. And I’m willing to look after you and make sure you have somewhere decent to live because I love you. But you have to make it easier on me. You aren’t making it easy on me at all. I don’t know whether you start drinking at nine in the morning or you drink at night, and no one else knows, either. And then you go out, and you’re drunk, and people from up the block, they come and tell me you’re totally drunk, walking around in the neighborhood. People leave me notes, ‘Vanessa, please call,’ and then I call, and people say that you’ve said the most awful stuff to them, Ma, and I want to let you go your own way, because you always went your own way, and that’s what makes you lovable, but not if you’re killing yourself, right? Do you really want to do that? I talked to the doctor. Ma, are you listening to what I’m saying? Here, use this. And what the doctor said is that your liver is really enlarged and it’s probably not going to last. You could get cirrhosis. Or you could get liver failure. And that’s when dementia starts to set in, you know. That might be what’s causing the disorientation. And you keep drinking with pancreatitis, that’s what all the bleeding is. That’s the course of the illness, Ma. You’re sick and you have an illness. And I have people calling saying you’re disoriented and confused wandering around the neighborhood, and the doctor says you have liver damage, but no one is going to replace your liver while you are drinking. So what am I supposed to do? Do you see me going out every night to clubs? I’m not going to clubs. Do you see me going on any dates? I’m not going out on any dates. If anyone even asked me out on a date, I’d turn them down, unless it’s a business thing. I’m not doing any of that. What I’m doing is coming back to the house to make sure you’re still alive. That’s what I think about at the office. I wonder if Ma will still be alive when I get home. It’s not even, oh, I wonder what horrible thing she’s got to say to me today. That’s what it’s like. So now you have a few days to cool it in here, and we’ll see what we can do about finding a rehab, and when you’re done here, I want you to tell me that you’re willing to go to the rehab, okay? I don’t want to hear anything out of your mouth, I just want to hear that you understand what’s going on and that you’re going to a rehab. Got it?”
The cranium of Rosa Elisabetta has found that the table is the best resting area. A long silence does not diminish the need for resting, nor moisture.
“Listen, do you want to hear what else is going on? You won’t believe the story that came into the office. You won’t believe it. Do you want to hear this? This treatment came through.”
Even in her diminished capacity, even with the medication coursing in her, Rosa can manage some guess as to the nature of the story, because all of the stories from the films that her daughter makes, they’re all about drugs, prostitution, travesti, families torn apart, people from history who try to kill other people from history, and young people who don’t respect their parents. So it must be one of those, probably the story about young people not respecting their parents. She can’t possibly get all of this out, especially with her head resting on the table, but she’s not diminished enough to forget what she thinks about her daughter’s films, which is that she won’t go to another movie opening unless her daughter stands up and thanks her personally in front of the audience. But just as she’s thinking this relatively straightforward and unfaithful thought, something numinous happens to her. She is suddenly a creek feeding into some larger stream, and in this continuum of the aquatic, she is awa
re of the very answer to this question, as if she has been submerged into it, and she knows the answer, so she whispers, “Diviners.”
Vanessa is stunned. Vanessa, who is ripple-shuffling a pack of playing cards sitting on the table in the dining room, stops everything to gaze at her mother. Deeply skeptical.
“Did Annabel tell you? Did you talk to Annabel?”
“Diviners.”
“How did you know?”
That’s when Rosa Elisabetta makes her first attempt to tell what happened after the seizure. She doesn’t know if she should tell, because it may be that telling anyone will create dosage-escalation criteria. During visiting hours there are always people around listening. You never know. There are two men on the far side of the room now and they are playing dominoes, although it’s unclear if they are actually playing the game or if they are just using the domino tiles for a construction operation that keeps their hands from fist formation. One of these men is saying, Yeah, thirteen times there and they just got tired of seeing him, couldn’t get no bed, nowhere nohow. These men could easily be listening.
“I heard certain things.”
“You what?”
“I heard certain things.”
“Sit up.”
“I was hearing certain conversations.”
“What do you mean?”
They took the phone privileges away from her, that was the first thing they did, because after they gave her the exam and remanded her to this ward, she got right on the phone, and she would not let anyone else use the phone, and she was belittling them, because this seemed pragmatic, but then she started to feel as if there were vermin around, a bad sign. She got up out of bed to demand that something be done about this vermin. If this was a respectable hospital in a respectable neighborhood in Brooklyn, at least they could ensure that there wouldn’t be hundreds of cockroaches in her room. And this was certainly criterion for dosage escalation, after which there is a gap in the story, and she is waking up on the floor of her room and they are telling her that she has had a seizure, and she feels as though a factory of aeronautics has opened in her vocabulary, and ideas appear like mobiles, but the best she can do is watch them circle. They prescribe some other thing, some other medication, an anticonvulsive, and when they give her the anticonvulsive it becomes clear that they have taken care of the vermin infestation. There are still moments she is unclear on. When exactly did the obese woman arrive in the room? No one will talk to her about the obese woman.
And in the middle of the night she began overhearing conversations, and it turns out that she recognizes some of the voices of the conversations, and these are people in her daughter’s office. First she recognizes the voice of the black girl, which is a voice she always liked, and maybe she just hears a voice because she admires a voice, and a voice is a thing of comfort. As when you are falling into sleep, fretting. Not the particular words of the voice but the sound of it, like it’s a melody of a song. And she always liked Annabel, called the office just to talk to Annabel sometimes, because Annabel reminded her of the children from the neighborhood. But she hears a particular conversation and then she hears Annabel talking to another person, who was a man. And the conversation is fishy, to be sure, not a good conversation, there are things going on there, with the man, who is, Rosa believes, the man in the office, the man from the mindless action films, and there is something going on between them. Even though he is a married man. She has an idea, in her bed, in the slipstream of detoxification, that there is something going on between Annabel and this married man, but out of this comes this idea, and that idea is —
“I heard about diviners.”
“But where did you hear about it?”
“I just heard about it.”
“Ma, you’re on drugs.”
Rosa cannot dispute certain hypotheses because it’s too tiring to dispute them. The orderly comes by and tells her to sit up.
“The story, it’s incredible, it’s like this gigantic story spanning thousands of years,” and then Vanessa, ignoring what Rosa has said, goes off on her plot summary, and Rosa is unable to follow the story, just as she was not really able to understand the voices after the seizure. She told the doctor that she had heard the voices, and the doctor asked what kind of voices, and she said she believed that they were the voices of persons acquainted with her, but they were not just any kind of voices, and the doctor asked what kind of voices, then, and she said that she was hearing voices from telephones. And he asked how did she know that they were voices on telephones, and Rosa said that she knew because there was static on the line. So, he said, you are receiving cellular telephone traffic? It had not occurred to her that it was cellular telephone traffic, because Rosa has never used a cellular telephone, and she only really knows about them because once she went to a matinée with a friend and she heard a cellular telephone go off; well, and then Vanessa, her daughter, has one, and her daughter let her try her cellular phone once, but who would she call? There was no one to call except her daughter. Nonetheless, it was a working theory that telephone calls took up residence in the affected parts, and when the affected parts were operating in such a way that one piece of information followed another, she formulated the thought that she had begun receiving the cellular telephone traffic of the city of New York in her head. She was now in condition of receiving and she could single out certain calls, and they were in fact the calls that had anguish in them, she could overhear only the calls that had anguish in them, for instance a call where some man was realizing that some stock that he had was going down. And she could hear that Annabel was suffering, not that Annabel gave away her anguish, because Annabel was a good girl and she would not let a little thing like a married man provoke a scene, but Rosa could hear the loneliness, all these calls were about loneliness; for example, later there was a call from Annabel to her parents, there was a call to her parents —
“So it’s going to make a really great television show, that’s what I think. I think we’re going to try to pitch it to one of the cable stations, and maybe there’ll be a way to make part of it in Italy, you know? Like, if they take it, I could just make sure that part of it’s in Italy, and maybe we could go back over there.”
And the other girl, is she an intern, the other girl, the one with the burns? It was late at night, and she was thinking about the burns. The obese woman in the next bed was like an oppression. Soon the obese woman would awake. And Rosa was afraid, and the part of her that was afraid was also overhearing the conversation from the girl with the burns. And now Rosa is hearing it all again, in the dining room with her daughter. She’s hearing, in her head, about the burns.
“Did you hear this thing in the papers? About Annabel’s brother? Ma, are you listening?”
It is almost the time of medication, which is why the voices, the telephone calls, are back, because it is the time of medication, which is the time when detoxification of addicts appears as what it is, a medical problem, and the moisture arguments do perhaps include a recognition of a retreating backward away from Vanessa, and from the neighborhood, and into the logic of the telephone calls.
“It’s in the papers. It’ll be the front page tomorrow. You watch and see if someone brings the paper in. A woman got hit in the head with a brick walking home yesterday, in midtown. She was just walking along, and someone hit her in the head with a brick. Just because she was there. I mean, who’s surprised about that? The thing is that the woman was hit in the head by a bicycle messenger. And they released information about a suspect this afternoon, and the suspect they are looking for is Annabel’s brother. Apparently he got into some kind of scuffle yesterday. So if you talk to Annabel, be nice to her. Her brother is missing. He just took off somewhere. Didn’t show up for work.”
The orderly announces that visiting hours are over. Vanessa helps Rosa up onto her feet, and Vanessa tells her that she loves her, in a nonchalant way, and then they walk down the corridor together, and the only clinging opportunity, for t
he moment, is onto the arm of her daughter. Rosa Elisabetta is worried about what night brings, about the fresh information of the night, which is worse than the television squawking in the dayroom. The only good thing about her illness of overheard voices is that it is not an illness of overheard television programming. Now she is back by the nurse’s console, and her daughter is talking to someone, and no doubt her daughter is describing their exchange, describing affected parts, describing the unusual occurrences that are now taking place in affected parts, and this is not good because it augurs a dosage escalation and a further reduction of things in their infrastructural simplicities, but there is no time for that because now the addicts are lining up.
12
His mom! His mom! Coming into the room! His mom is beautiful! He forgets his mom is coming into the room and then she comes into the room, and it’s a surprise and then here she is and he loves her. He forgets how beautiful she is, and then suddenly she is coming into the room to take him home, and he remembers that she is so beautiful, because she has hair this dark, and she has dark eyes, and she is beautiful and round. And she’s his mom. And she has the spot right between her eyes which is a beautiful spot, and nobody else’s mom here has that spot, which means it is beautiful. And when his mom smiles, it’s a beautiful smile, and when she doesn’t smile, that means it’s a time before smiling, and this is a beautiful time because a smile will come along soon. And his mom talks in a beautiful way that is different from the way that everybody else’s mom talks. She says things in a beautiful way, a way that sounds different, because she comes from another place, but he can’t remember what this place is called. He knows that he lives in Queens, and he is in Queens now, at least he thinks he is, and his mother is in the room and she is talking to the nice lady, and the nice lady and his mom are smiling and they are pointing. He is good and maybe he is the best of all the children. And the nice lady is going around the room and she is showing his mother all the things that everybody has made today, like Eddie made an airplane and then Eddie spent a long time standing in one corner with the airplane, making the noise of an airplane. He was there almost all day, and the nice lady had to tell him he needed to do something besides just make the airplane noise, and he didn’t pay any attention, and later another boy went over and pushed him down and told him to shut up, took away the plane, stamped on it, and everyone started crying. The nice lady tried to explain about how they didn’t need to cry and that this was a problem to solve, but Jaspreet didn’t understand what she was saying and neither did Eddie or the other boy, the stamper, and anyway, Jaspreet just wanted to use the glue stick and to be left alone. He’s excited about lining up the glue with the edges of things that he has cut out. He’s excited because he will not use too much glue on these pictures that he has cut out. If you put too much glue on, then the picture won’t stick. But if you put down just the right amount of glue, then the picture stays, and this makes him happy, like his mother coming in makes him happy. Also, there is a girl called Denise, and Denise makes him happy, he isn’t sure why. When she gets mad, she throws everything on the floor and cries, and one day she wouldn’t stop biting other people and she punctured the skin on Jaspreet’s arm. But even when she is crying, he always wants to put his hand on the top of her head. Sometimes he just gets up in the middle of the class, and then he goes over and puts his hand on the top of her head. No matter what she is trying to do, he will put his hand on the top of her head. Usually there are pigtails or there is a braid, but sometimes the hair is all pulled up on the very top, and there is a thing that makes it stay on the top of her head, and if he puts his hand on the top of her head when this thing is making the hair stay up, then she will squeal or cry, and the nice lady will say, “Jaspreet, stop touching the top of Denise’s head.” Or the nice lady will tell him to stop touching her ear. Because he also likes to touch Denise’s ear, the little part at the bottom of her ear, it has a gold ring in it, and he just likes to go and touch this spot. If she’s in a good mood and has not thrown things on the floor or bitten anybody, then she smiles when he puts his hand on the top of her head, and they stay there like that.