by Rick Moody
Rosa says, “Call my daughter; you can release me to my daughter. Have the . . . someone can call my . . . you can release me to my daughter.” But the doctor is retreating to the dayroom. By the time Rosa fathoms what has been said to her, he is underneath the television set, rubbing his hands together nervously, and now Rosa is shuffling toward the dayroom. She is listening to the radiator and wondering if the radiator is actually making the noise that it seems to be making, the sound of someone strangling. The ward is talking excitedly about how wonderful the obese woman was, even though nobody actually interacted with the obese woman because she never came out of the room even once.
In the afternoon, her daughter is meant to come and collect her. Rosa is wearing the clothes she was wearing when she was admitted, and she is frail, and yet she is filled with a grandiose hope. She has come to have a purpose. She has survived this reversal and she is repaired, more or less, and the sunset over the western expanse of Brooklyn, out the hospital windows, is magnificent, and the beauty of the sunset on Thursday is a metaphor for her indomitability, no matter if she’s going to have to return on an outpatient basis so that they can monitor the blood levels of the medication that makes her mouth so dry she can barely peel her lips apart to complain. She is special, in her way, because she has been chosen to hear conversations, and if she is to hear the conversations on the outside, then she will be special there, too, because she knows things that no one else knows, and this makes her worthy and important. The inner workings of politics and culture and conspiracy are revealed to her and her alone.
At 4:30, Rosa asks the nurse, since she’s standing in her street clothes (overnight bag at her feet) by the door marked Exit, if she can just go down the hall to get herself a nice candy bar, a little snack. The nurse has two calls on hold, as well as, in front of her, a snaggle-toothed man in his underwear demanding special treatment in Cantonese, and she can’t be bothered to think twice about Rosa and the candy bar. Maybe if she were thinking, this nurse would think about why Rosa needs to take her overnight bag to go to the candy machine down the hall, but it doesn’t cross her mind, and by the time it does, Rosa is already on the elevator. By the time they check the elevator, Rosa is already on the street. By the time they check out the front of the hospital, she’s past the chain bookstore, heading for the liquor store.
It’s important to choose a liquor store that is different from the last you visited. This is known as freedom of choice. When was the last time you went to the liquor store? Which liquor store were you going to? How is that liquor store laid out? Were you just a couple days away from being incarcerated in the detoxification ward? Then you must certainly go to a different liquor store because your patronage at various establishments ensures that there will be competition among package store businesses in your area, as it also ensures that you do not get personally close to any of the owners of these businesses. No choice but to go farther over, onto Sixth Avenue, where Rosa hopes she can find a store where she has not been lately. This she does, in a state of apprehension.
It’s rush hour, and the weather seems sharply colder than when she was incarcerated, and she might feel bad about her daughter, who will be at the hospital any minute now and who will be wondering why her mother is not in the hospital, and the hospital employees will be sheepishly searching the premises, but Rosa cannot worry about this now because she has a mission, and the first part of the mission is the liquor store, and when she reaches it—there are the usual warped linoleum floors and the reek of fresh industrial detergent—she is overwhelmed with hopefulness. The liquor store is owned and operated by Spanish speakers. She selects a pint of cheap rye whiskey and she asks the owner-operator if he will dust off the bottle, and this he does, when at last he understands, making use of a handy feather duster he keeps behind the register.
Rosa takes the bottle onto the street, where everyone is hurrying home, and she opens the bottle, nestled in its paper bag. When the blended whiskey hits the back of her throat, she can feel her throat close up, out of stunned delight, and she can feel the spiny points of anxiety begin to diminish, and she can feel the telephone conversations receding into some distant chamber of intelligence, from which only the occasional word or phrase will rise out of the murk, “marinade,” “pomegranate,” “mons pubis,” and this is exactly where she wants to be in the battle against hallucination and mental illness, because it enables her to pursue the next stage of her mission.
It’s months since she rode the subway, many months more since she rode the subway during rush hour, but perhaps the spectacle of her, a woman who has quarreled with the basic chemistries of human identity and who, in the process, has been given access to the entire global network of cellular telephone calls from which to pick and choose in her analysis of contemporary mores, is enough to induce people to move out of her way. She makes for the rearmost car of the train, and here she secures one of the seats that are meant to be left for invalids, and she sits in the invalid’s seat, and she drinks and passes an agreeable trip into Manhattan, to Forty-second Street, where she disembarks. Now Rosa Elisabetta walks through the long stinking tunnel that takes her to her destination, the bus terminal of fever dreams, where she hastens to the ticket booth, pink neon framing the disconsolate face of a woebegone bus company salesperson. She removes from her wallet some of the last of her rumpled cash, and she pushes it through the slot to the morose ticket agent and tells him that, yes, she’s going to Florida, where she’s going to put a stop to all this election madness.
24
The Krispy Kreme franchise in flames.
An impossible thing to fathom, that someone would come here to Concord, a sleepy suburb, home to lawyers and venture capitalists, drive past Emerson’s grave, and firebomb the local Krispy Kreme, the first in the state. Where did these fiends obtain the incendiary devices? Where did they get the will and the means to firebomb the Krispy Kreme? And was it true, as rumor indicated, that Concord was now home to a small mobile revolutionary cell? The Krispy Kreme was located on Main Street, of course, and now every citizen could walk by its remains. They would smell scorched yeast, burnt plastic, and electrical panels. The picture windows of the storefront had been shattered by the all-volunteer fire department in an attempt to contain the blaze, and this mission was successful. The only related damage was to the floor above the doughnut restaurant. Well, there was some smoke damage in the adjacent florist’s shop. No one was hurt.
The conflagration had erupted at eleven or just after, according to the newspaper accounts. A man “purchasing a six-pack” at the convenience store up the block saw figures rounding the corner. He wondered why these figures were running. A light sleeper whose apartment backed up to Main Street heard everything. She could verify the time. Occupants of a car passing at the appointed hour saw a pair of suspicious persons in tan overcoats in front of the Krispy Kreme.
No doubt, it was a terrorist group of some kind, as editorials opined. Some kind of domestic terrorist cadre had come here to Concord, or to the Boston area, and had brought with it the suspicion and fear attendant upon such things. There were terrorist groups in other places, in Israel and Palestine, in Chechnya, in Indonesia, but not in Concord. Until now. Even if this was some kind of radical environmentalist group with “humane” ideas about the destruction of property, it was still a terrorist group. The aim of terrorist groups was to produce anxiety about the future, and this was in fact what this terrorist group had produced “in spades,” according to an editorial on the subject. This is exactly what Max Duffy’s mother is saying on Friday afternoon, thinking out loud, as she slows in the bottleneck at the former site of the Krispy Kreme franchise, believing, according to her theories about the psychology of teenagers, that if Maximillian Duffy is to understand the error of his ways, he needs to see what revolutionary principles have wrought in one New England town.
“The bus driver lived up there,” she remarks, pointing at the blackened window casements above the Krispy Kreme re
staurant. She’s made sure that her son has seen the articles in the local press. She’s made sure that he understands that the FBI promises to be involved in the investigation. The ancient Volvo belonging to the Reverend and Mrs. Duffy halts, like the cars ahead of it, and mother and son rubberneck past the black shell of the doughnut purveyor. Shattered glass, forlorn interior, police barriers, orange cones, scorched industrial equipment dragged out onto the sidewalk. At a Dumpster, scowling municipal workers heave up bits of wreckage.
Of course, they’d already taken Eduardo Alcott into custody. That’s the part that Max can’t figure out. Apparently they came for him after Tyrone called the police. And if the other Retrievalists were now remanded into the care of their parents or guardians, awaiting the possibility of charges in Eduardo’s case, then who actually performed the firebombing? Since the Krispy Kreme arson project had never been written down, as nothing was ever written down at Eduardo’s, there was no evidence of their plans. Who brought about this bold threat to unchecked multinational franchising? Was it really a terrorist group? Or was it a bunch of teenagers who had smoked too much pot and who just got into the pyrotechnics of the thing? Were they freedom fighters? Were they ordinary criminals? Were they rogue employees who couldn’t make ends meet at minimum wage and who were making a statement about pay scale? Was it somebody who wanted fresh original glazed doughnuts and was unhappy that none were for sale?
The town fathers had their theories. The town fathers had each been photographed in front of the rubble, decrying the national mood of permissiveness and complacency that led to such unthinkable tragedy. None of them knows any more than Max knows himself, probably quite a bit less, because they have never heard from the kids who hang out in the Krispy Kreme parking lot, smoking. The doughnut restaurant was practically new, was part of a rollout of Krispy Kreme franchises here in the Northeast, and now it is gone, and with it almost a dozen good jobs and a place for kids to go on weekends.
He asks his mother if she’ll at least let him go for a walk, to think things over. She’s kept him inside these last few days. Since Tyrone came home, Max hasn’t even gone to school, and he’s going as crazy as his brother. Anything to get out of the car, anything to get out of her sight, anything to have a moment in the company of nature.
“You could just take me over to —”
“Oh, to the —”
If it’s those woods she can hardly refuse him, because those woods have literary pedigree, and whenever Max seems to be living inside the parental dream of a fine education, no problem. So she takes the county road, congested during the evening commute, and soon she is alongside the celebrated pond. Deborah pulls the car over, and Max gets out of the car and says he’ll be back in ten.
He had school lectures in these woods, he had plant identification classes. He knows the varieties of ferns, Christmas fern and ebony spleenwort, and a good portion of the birches and firs and maples. He can identify the nuthatches and the wrens and the warblers, chickadees, and red-winged blackbirds; according to his indoctrination, he recognizes part of the Utopian vision of Eduardo Alcott, whose goal is the rescue of Gaia, or Mother Earth, from the one true pest species, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Naturally, there is more to the Alcott narrative than Max has told his mother. There is more to the story than the rights of the forest, the rights of Mother Earth to be free from the meddling of the human animal. For example, with each of the Retrievalists, Eduardo attempted to inculcate a particular environmental skill. With Nina, Eduardo taught her to fire rifles and shotguns, so that she might use these to prune the population of hunters and sportsmen; and with Glenn, Eduardo taught him to lay traps. (In fact, Glenn came out of his training well-versed in survivalist techniques, which is probably going to come in handy during his summer job at the local nursery, where he will be heaving bags of pine bark nuggets into the backs of sport utility vehicles.)
What Eduardo taught Max was the skill of divining. This may have been an indication of some special esteem for Maximillian because divining, as Eduardo put it, was the most recondite of these Retrievalist disciplines. There had to be complete trust for the lessons to take place, there had to be an absence of worldly distractions, there had to be attention and humility. Eduardo took Max out into the dwindling forests of the region. Sometimes they went driving for an hour or more to find a suitable place. They went to the old New England, the vanishing New England, the New England of gothic tales and Indian clashes. Then, when the forest was thick enough, Eduardo would pass on the arcana of dowsing.
The first thing to learn was that there was no explanation for what was about to take place. There was no empirical explanation as to why it worked, any more than it was possible to explain why Catholicism worked. If you believed, it did. Perhaps dowsing had something to do with geology, and with the geological history that was imprinted in each and every human body; or perhaps it had something to do with magnetism, with the tiny particles that conveyed the universal force known as electromagnetism; or perhaps it had something to do with Druidic wisdom, the white magic of the Druids that the Romans failed to suppress; or perhaps it had to do with auras and chi energy and the orphic wisdom of New Age bookshops, like the bookshop two doors down from the Krispy Kreme restaurant of Concord. Whatever the cause, dowsing worked. This was the first lesson: Utilize, don’t analyze.
They were up near Monadnock, the most hiked mountain in the United States. “Science is the stooge of capitalism,” Eduardo was saying. “Science serves the pig. It has no creative abilities, it has only this tendency to do what is expected of it, which is to accept the logic of product and the merchandising that is its lifeblood. The vassals of capitalism do as they are told. And the vassals of capitalism are research and development lackeys. So don’t believe that this skill I’m teaching has anything to do with science.”
These were the lessons of the survivalist cadres, of Maoist guerrillas in the Amazon. And to prove the lie of science, Eduardo now grasped his Y rod, the traditional forked stick of divining—a polished piece of the witch hazel—and he held the ends of the stick between the third and fourth fingers of his upturned hands, thumbs on the ends, as he explained to Max, with the point of the stick upward. Then he spun in a clockwise direction, eyes closed, so that the strain and anxiety of Eduardo’s veined face yielded a little bit. He went on spinning until an incredible thing happened, a thing that even Max was able to witness, notwithstanding disbelief. The stick seemed to tremble violently at first and then, despite all the energy that Eduardo used against it, the stick began to fight its way in a downward direction, until it was drooping past the median point of Eduardo’s belt line. It was now definitely pointing toward the earth. Eduardo came to a stop, opened his eyes, and, grinning, he pronounced the results of his experiment: “I am now facing magnetic north.”
He explained that the forked stick, in terms of design, was mainly of interest as an antique. Nobody used the forked stick anymore, really. What they used were metal rods, L-shaped rods, like this:
and these metal rods were contained in plastic sleeves, usually the grips from bicycle handles. You could make the L rods from conventional wire coat hangers, the kind you might get at your neighborhood dry cleaner. You placed them in the bicycle handles, Eduardo said. And then you went out into the natural world and you waited to see what the metal rods would tell you. If the rods fanned out in a V shape, that was a “yes,” and if the rods crossed their tips that was also a “yes,” in reply to whatever question you were asking, such as whether there was water in a place or whether there was a vein of silver ore. Only if the rods failed to react was the answer in the negative.
“For today,” Eduardo said, “we will content ourselves with finding potable water, since that’s a bit of magic that you can easily make use of. Let’s empty our canteens first, so that we can experience the sensation of thirst like our revolutionary brothers in the Mexican desert. And then we will see what we can see.”