by John Crowley
“We ask that young children not be brought to the floor, actually,” the nurse said who came to bring her to Boney’s room.
“Well we just wanted to peek in,” Rosie said.
“You’re a daughter?” said the nurse.
“Well sort of.” She looked straight ahead. “By adoption.”
“Well,” said the nurse. “If he’s active. Let’s see.”
Beyond the heavy door of the “semi-private” room (what would that mean anywhere else in the world?) was one empty bed wrapped in tight sheets like a package; and the drawn curtain, beyond which was Boney’s bed. The nurse looked around it and greeted him heartily. Folks here to see you. Want me to run you up?
Sam (not having said a word yet, clutching tightly the bouquet she had picked for him and the get-well card she had made) watched Boney’s head slowly arise from prone as the bed bent in the middle.
“Neat, huh?” Rosie said. “Hi, Boney.”
He looked ashen and small, but not necessarily near death; not as bad as he had looked when Rosie had looked in on him near dawn. He fumbled his glasses on and blinked at Rosie and Sam. “Well. Well, how nice.”
“How are you?”
Boney raised both his hands slightly, as though to exhibit himself. In the loose mottled skin of his left hand, bandages held an IV, which trailed away to a bottle hanging on a stand.
“Still all there, huh?” Rosie said. “What do they say?”
“Well they’re going to send me home,” Boney said. “I don’t think that’s a good sign.”
“Why not?”
“Well I think. I think it means they’re giving up on me. They’re not even going to try to fix me. That’s what it means. That it’s not worth trying.”
“Oh I bet not,” Rosie said, alarmed.
“Let me go home and die. That’s what they think. Hello, sweetheart.”
“You want to give him your stuff?” Rosie pushed Sam gently forward, but Sam turned instead, and would not go near him. Rosie touched her hair and looked into her face. Sam was furious.
“What is it, hon?”
Sam stamped her foot. “Why is he like that?”
“Like what?”
“What is it in his hand?”
“That helps him get better. Hon …”
Sam crossed her arms and marched from the room, her feet striking hard.
“What is it?” Boney asked.
“God, sorry Boney.”
She went out into the hall and caught up with her daughter, who had stopped suddenly when confronted with the somber length of the hall, where now a man trundled a walker with painful steps, an oxygen tube over his nose, white hair mussed.
“Sam?” Rosie knelt beside her to talk. “Did you get scared?”
“I don’t like what they did to him.”
“Well won’t you come back in?”
“No.” Sam stood arms akimbo, resolute against pain and disease, unreconciled. Afraid though actually, maybe, probably; alarmed, certainly.
“He shouldn’t be like that,” she said.
“But he’s getting better,” Rosie said. “Did you hear? He’s coming home. If you give him your card, he can look at it, and it might make him so cheerful he’ll get better faster.”
She put her arm around Sam where she knelt in the hallway, herself wrapped in a sudden awful pity, but for whom? The little hospital seemed shadowed momentarily as by a dark wing, a shadow she knew. “I think he’s lonely in there,” she said.
Still Sam wouldn’t move when Rosie gently tugged on her hand; angry tears rose in her eyes, and she crossed her arms tightly before her. Another shuffler with toothless gasping mouth (too much trouble to put in the teeth yet, it seemed) went past them.
“Okay?” Rosie said, afraid she might weep herself.
“Oh kay,” Sam said fiercely. They went together back toward Boney’s room.
“Here we are again,” he said faintly.
Sam approached him. His ticking hand lay on the sheet, bruised blue where the IV needle had gone in. “Why did they tie you to this?” she demanded.
“So I wouldn’t slip away,” Boney said. “But I won’t.”
She gave him her card, accepting it from Rosie as a dignitary accepts from his aide the medal he passes to the hero; and then the bouquet. Boney in return gave her the miniature chocolate pudding that had come with his lunch.
“Rosie,” he said. He had sunk back on the bed, looking mummified. She came close to hear. “That young fellow, why can I never remember his name.”
“Pierce?”
“Yes. Has he said anything to you, how it’s going there …”
“Boney, you don’t have to think about that stuff.”
“I don’t think about anything else.”
“Well except I’m not sure he entirely understands what …”
“He does. He does. He may not say so to you.”
“Okay,” she said softly. “Okay.” Did it always do this, the nearness of death, strip away the courtesies? She would have thought they were part of Boney’s nature; it was odd hearing him talk as though to himself. Was death going to do that, take away everything from him bit by bit, and leave him naked of everything but this crazy wish or want?
He lifted himself off the bed on one elbow, laboring some-what for breath. “Congestion,” he said. “Supposed to bring it up.” He tried to clear his lungs, but couldn’t.
“Pound his back,” said Sam, busy with the pudding.
“You want me to?” Rosie said. She approached him gingerly. The open back of his hospital johnny, loosely tied, revealed a weird eroded landscape of skin and muscle. She patted while Boney harked weakly.
“Like that?”
“Good. Thank you.” He hunched forward, arms draped over his knees. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Once upon a time the Foundation used to give out grants. To individuals. Research things, or study grants. They were a little hard to fit into our, our.” He waved vaguely, trying to think of a word like mission or statement of goals and not finding it. “Anyway we did give out a few, nothing very large. I would like to establish that again. A small program of study grants. Study abroad.”
“Okay,” Rosie said tentatively, unwilling to ask for details here and now. What he had said had emptied him like a cup, and now panting slightly he waited to refill.
“Soon though,” he said.
“Well sure.”
“Tell him,” he said, and Rosie had to think who. “That I have to know it meant nothing. That it was only a game. I have to know or I can’t, I won’t … Oh Rosie.” He lay again, but not to rest. “I have to be sure.”
She felt his forehead; it was hot, filmed with icy sweat. He tried to rise again, seeming unable to breathe, and Rosie pressed the nurse’s call button. “Just a sec, okay?” she whispered. “Just a sec.” She held his head up and he made a spectral groan. Rosie looked down to see Sam looking up at them.
The nurse hustled the visitors out, looking at the two of them slightly aggrieved, and then tore the curtains rapidly around Boney’s bed. The rattle of the rings, the shroud lifting outward on the air of its quick passage, a wing of white enveloping silence: Rosie watching it, watching Boney covered, remembered again, something she could not name.
“The nurse was mean.”
“No she wasn’t, hon. She just wanted Boney not to get too tired.” Rosie backed the Bison out of its spot in the parking lot.
“She stepped on my card.” A tear welled in her eye, always amazing to watch how quick they came. Welled.
“Oh hey now. He was real glad to see you. He liked your card. And your flowers.”
“Will he die when he gets home?”
“No,” she said.
“He said he would.”
“Well.” The day had turned blindingly hot, dusted as with silver powder, and mirages of water trembled in the hollows of the road ahead. “He’s real old, Sam. And finally when you’re real old.”
“I know Mommy.
I do know.” Resigned, resigned and sad. Offering her mother the comfort of her wisdom and acceptance. Rosie marveled. Was all knowledge of life maybe nothing more than the right imitation of knowledge? Then Sam knew as much as she did herself.
“Hey listen,” Rosie said, change the subject, as much for her own sake as Sam’s. “You want to get the car washed?”
“Car washed?”
“Sure. There’s a place just up here. We ought to.”
“What,” Sam said suspiciously, thinking maybe her leg was being pulled.
“Wash the car. With big brushes and water. You’ll see.”
Had Sam ever been through a carwash? Rosie tried to remember. Maybe once, too young to wonder. Rosie didn’t wash the big Bison station wagon often, it seemed a little pretentious to drive such a heap through those ministrations, old biddy giving herself the beauty treatment. Mike shook his head at the neglect, it had always been clean when he had owned it.
“Right here,” she said. “See?”
Sam withheld judgment.
“Roll up the window real tight, can you. Tight tight.”
“Why?”
“So the water won’t come in.” She paid her dollar, engaged her wheel with the track, and let go of the steering wheel. Sam looked from the abandoned wheel, moving slightly by itself, to the dark tunnel ahead, to her mother’s face: not reassured by it. “I don’t want to,” she said.
“It’s fun,” Rosie said. “Wait till you see.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Well you can’t get out now, hon. Got to go on through to the other side. Come sit with me.”
With startling suddenness the water jets opened, thundering on the roof and hood, and Sam leapt to her mother’s side. “I dowanto I dowanto!”
“Watch watch,” Rosie said. She had always loved carwashes herself, the letting go of the wheel, the torrential drenching. Out of your hands.
Was he going to die? Was she going to be with him? She wondered what Boney thought happened to you after you died. She had not asked and certainly would not, but it would be easier, she thought, if she knew what he expected. Or feared. If there was anything he feared, anything but the shut door itself.
So afraid.
Sam held tight to her arm as things happened one after another, each more astonishing and alarming than the last if you had never seen them before. After the water bardo came the bardo of brushes: huge furry animals fell on them, spinning like dervishes, bright blue for some reason, and Sam stared at them in disbelief. This was not the reason anyone ever had a kid, but it turned out to be one of the greatest gratifications of it, and one that no one ever described to you: to see in them the amazing world experienced, and so experience it again yourself as for the first time.
Next came Flapper Monsters, black hundred-armed whirlers that slapped them side and top, the roaring and clattering of the machines and water never ceasing, nor the slow purgatorial crawl forward of the car. Sam flinched from them, but laughing now at last, getting it. Last and funniest of all the Sucker Creatures, slit-mouths at the end of flexible yellow necks, drinking the excess water from the car as hot air blew and droplets chased one another across the windows. And now the end of their trials visible, the cave-mouth and the day, and then they had emerged from their funhouse into the quiet and the sunlight, rain-dappled, clean.
“Let’s go again,” Sam said, a convert now.
“We can’t go again right away,” Rosie said. “Now we’re clean. We have to wait till we get dirty again.”
“We’ll get dirty again?”
“Oh we will,” Rosie said. “We will.”
EIGHT
Moving back toward Blackbury Jambs with the evening traffic hurrying toward home and supper. Was there a new noise down within the Bison’s workings, far away along the drive train? Almost not worth fixing; but then what?
“Look, it’s Pierce,” said Sam.
No one Rosie could see anywhere. “No it’s not, hon.”
“Tis too,” Sam said, pointing, and now Rosie did see the back of a tall person, a white shirt luffing in the evening breeze, who was toiling along the roadside where not much provision had been made for walkers, and carrying two full shopping bags, from the supermarket she had just passed probably.
“See?” Sam said, still pointing.
“Sharp eyes,” Rosie said. She passed by him and pulled over to the shoulder as carefully as she could given that her car had no rear-view mirror stuck on the windshield. She waved back to Pierce, who took a long time to notice her, seeming hypnotized by the noise and the traffic’s progress.
“Thanks, thanks,” he said, as he clambered with his crackling bags into the back. “Road was getting a little long.”
“I would think so,” Rosie said.
“What did you buy?” Sam wanted to know.
“Unnecessarily heavy food,” Pierce said. Sam laughed; Pierce had learned to amuse her by using big words and a grownup tone. “Things in metal cans and glass jars. I should have bought light things. Sponge cake. Sponges. Wonder Bread.”
“Balloons,” said Sam.
“Bubbles,” Pierce said. “Which are heavy till you blow them, though.”
“You,” said Sam, with a weirdly grown-up gesture of coquettish dismissal. “You are so silly.”
“What you should do,” Rosie said, “is get a car. Isn’t there at least a bus from the store to town?”
“Well I noticed there was,” Pierce said. “It picks people up at a bench there. But everyone waiting for it seemed to have a good reason for taking it. Extreme old age. Feeble-mindedness. Bad eyesight. Real poverty. You know. I felt I might be unwelcome. A guy who obviously has no reason not to be driving.”
“Now,” Rosie said to Sam, “he is being silly.”
Pierce really had intended, without exactly foreseeing the process, eventually to learn to drive and then acquire a car. He had arrived at his present age unlicensed in part because he had not very often or very badly needed to drive—he had gone to a private prep school from which egress was largely forbidden during the school terms, and at Noate, his university, only upperclassmen were allowed cars. By then a distaste for cars and driving had become a feature of the eccentric character he was assembling for himself like a suit of homemade armor, and in the city to which he moved no one drove anyway, no one Pierce knew.
But there was an abiding and aboriginal fear too, which had kept him from ever being tempted; where cars had been to Joe Boyd and the boys of the Cumberlands heart-filling personifications (even named, often) of freedom and power and heat, to Pierce they had been like the dogs chained to stakes outside Cumberland cabins, or encountered roaming free in the hollers: big beasts, minding their own business but to be dealt with gingerly or not at all. He still sometimes dreamed of such dogs, but filled with mindless malevolence, their chains giving way like twine; and he had dreams too of finding himself inexplicably at the wheel, under way and the pedals useless, the car speeding willfully toward ruin.
Anyway so many bodies had been broken, so many cars demolished in those years by the boys of Kentucky, so many boys themselves slain too (crushed like nutmeats within their huge old Hornets or new Hawks or Impalas, boot still on the accelerator, cigarette tucked behind the ear), that the insurance premium on such drivers was fearsome; Sam decided that Pierce and Joe Boyd would have to raise the extra themselves in order to get their learner’s permits, which Joe Boyd somehow did quickly and easily and Pierce never tried very hard to do. His female cousins had no such impediment, and got their licenses early on (Hildy even learned under Sam’s instruction, a mortification she felt earned her millennia of credit hereafter). So Pierce wangled rides with them.
“It’s not that I have something against cars,” he said to Rosie. “I have fond feelings for some. I lost my virginity in a car. Hers.”
“Oh yes?”
“A Lark,” Pierce said. “A now-forgotten kind, that only existed briefly. I would be one of very few, I would think
.”
“Are you going to get a license?”
“I have every intention. I have a learner’s permit. My lifetime third. The others went stale before I learned.”
“Oh right. Val drove you in. To get the permit.”
“It was remarkable,” Pierce said. “A dozen teenagers, one widow suddenly on her own, and me.”
“Did you pass?”
“That was the most remarkable part. You were set ten questions to answer, but you only needed to get eight right. Only eight. Which seems to mean that you could be under the impression, for instance, that the red octagon sign is the sign for Caution and not Stop, and still be allowed to take the wheel.”
“Oh everybody knows.” Rosie pushed the Bison around a broad traffic circle, heading for the exit into Blackbury Jambs. A sign directed her to Merge. Now how exactly (Pierce wondered) do you Merge? Are there rules? Not explained in his learner’s manual. Just sort of ease in apparently. Everybody knows.
“I saw Boney today,” Rosie told him.
“How is he?”
“Well. He’s coming home.”
“He’s not sick anymore,” Sam said.
“Good,” said Pierce.
“Well,” Rosie warned. Pierce asked no more.
They entered onto the bridge across the somnolent summer river, and the ridges of its surface thrummed beneath the Bison.
“When you see him again,” Pierce said, “tell him I’ve found some interesting things. Not,” he cautioned, “like astonishing. But. Kraft did own some nice books.”
“I bet.”
He told her about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
“The what,” Rosie said, in exasperated wonderment. “Good lord.”
“Say it again,” Sam said laughing.
Pierce split the words: “Hypn. Eroto. Machia. Poliphili. That’s: Sleep. Love. Struggle. Of Poliphilus. You might say: The Love-struggle of Poliphilus in a Dream. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” He looked back at Sam and laughed aloud with her. “Absolutely one of the great strange unreadable books of all time.”
“But you’ve read it.”