The News of the World: Stories

by Ron Carlson

  During my pregnancy I couldn’t see a thing. It was wonderful. My work at the hospital took on a day-to-day quality that I loved. Things got dirty, I washed them. Something would drop on the floor, I would clean it up. It was cause and effect, no thick vertigo full of sad cinema. How I loved those slow days, each separate from the other, the only continuum my stomach filling with my daughter Irene.

  The day she was born I passed out for thirty-six hours during which I saw the rest. I even saw this night, tonight. I saw it all.

  Two weeks after Irene was born, Josie, the nine-year old daughter of the couple who shared our duplex, disappeared. They searched for her for two months before I walked into the police station one day and told them to look a hundred yards below the end of Wymer’s old dirt road at the base of Brave Mountain. I’d known about it for five weeks, ever since the mother, Samantha, who everybody called Sam, and who was close as close with me while I was carrying Irene, who taught me the real simple pleasure of gossip and the small satisfaction of folding clothes, Samantha came over, not crying, and she touched my hand as I gave her the coffee and I saw the guy drop the body on the ground. I knew where he was because that was Brave Mountain right behind him. I got scared because it was all starting again, and this time it was serious. I knew what would happen if I went to the police and it did happen, you didn’t have to be psychic to see that. But I couldn’t let Norm and Samantha go on not knowing where their baby was. I thought of anonymous notes. I thought of anonymous calls, but no. Do you see? A little girl was dead, and you can’t stop it. I saw it all.

  When the police returned that afternoon it was already in the papers: PSYCHIC FINDS BODY OF MISSING GIRL. Psychic. I’ve always loved that word. One of the first movies Allen took me to was Harper, starring Paul Newman, and he has that line in the roadhouse where he says to the bartender, “You must be physic,” meaning “psychic.” I must be physic. But it was in the papers.

  The next day the press started coming round and that was pretty hard on Allen, who is a kind man and a fine doctor, to have these monkeys in our front yard with cameras and a newborn girl in the house, but the worst was the letters and phone calls. Could I come to Portland to find a man’s wife? Could I come to Baton Rouge and find the missing children. Just the letters in my hands started all the strange engines of seeing in my heart. The guys finally climbed off our lawn, but the mail kept up steady. Every other day I’d get a call, some female voice so full of electricity I’d end up sitting on the floor with the receiver in my lap. She was sure if I’d just come and sit in Terry’s room, I could find her baby.

  I stopped eating, and in a week I was this old. That was twelve years ago. Late, late at night when I was in bed with Allen, I’d get up and go out on the porch in Reno, Nevada, and just try to see the stars. Do you see? My life was over. I could see it all, and let me say it plain: that is no comfort. You want to see the future? You’re welcome to it.

  The night I left, I held Irene in my arms. I stood naked in the nursery Allen and I had fixed up together and I held her naked in my naked arms, and when I saw her and what time had in store for her, I set her down, dressed, and left. She’s okay. She’s going to be an architect. Isn’t that wonderful? And Allen’s okay. He won’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he’ll have three articles in The New England Journal of Medicine soon, two in one issue, and he has a fine woman who lives with him outside of Reno now, his wife, a woman with a garden.

  I drifted around Nevada for a while doing honest work, trying not to touch anyone. I went to Arizona for the horse races, but found I couldn’t pick a winner, some jockey’s miseries would get in my way or sometimes I could only see some old horse standing on a rocky slope in his old age waiting to be fed. So I went back up to Vegas, felt my way around for a while, and found that I could make a lot of money playing craps. I tried to be careful and only slipped up once toward the end of the three months I was banking it away. I got a little sick of the town, sick of my motel on Fremont, and I wanted to send Allen and Irene the money and be done with the West and its vistas, so to speak. I hopped on the hardways one night at the Union Plaza and hit them so cleanly that the pit boss took over the stick and then some folks gathered around, but I didn’t care, them calling me “Lady Luck” and following me on the hard eight, the hard ten. I made my last bet under the eyes of the manager—nine hundred on boxcars at thirty to one. I saw them a full minute before all twelve dots rolled fatly up to everybody’s eyes. There was a cheer that shut the place down. When the manager handed me the slip for my winnings, he touched my finger and I saw his forehead through the windshield of his Seville off the Searchlight highway in a ditch. Since I’d broken all my rules about using the vision that night anyway, I said to him: “Stop drinking, you’re going to kill yourself.”

  That article was in the paper too, about “Lady Luck,” this mystery woman taking forty thousand out of the Plaza, but they didn’t have a picture, so I was okay. I sent the clipping and most of the money to Allen. In the note I said, “I’ll always love you,” because it was true, and because I could see his good face when he read it. So, then I was clear. I just had these terrible eyes, but no one else, no one to hurt or to complicate with hurt the rest of my life.

  I used my money staying away from people, traveling first class where you don’t have to touch, and staying in the best hotels where you’re basically paying for everyone to stay away from you. I didn’t want to hand some bellboy a dollar and see him raping his sister. I didn’t want time to have its way with me.

  In the winter, some years later, I was in Toronto on the third floor of the Toronto Hilton when I saw Anwar Sadat killed. I was in the bathtub taking one of the many baths I took every day, not reading, not listening to the radio, and I saw the stands and the parade and the truck coming.

  I got dressed, went down to the bar, and picked up a professor from the University of Ontario who was at a Joyce Carol Oates Conference and took him to my room for a day and a half until he had to deliver his paper. It was the first sexual experience I had had since Allen, and it was fine in that it filled me with nothing but this professor and the ten million student papers he was going to read poorly the rest of his career, but when he went downstairs to address the multitudes, I turned in the bed and saw the truck, the parade, the stands.

  I left Toronto. Do you see? I didn’t know what to do.

  I worked in a Wendy’s in Birmingham, Alabama, for almost a month. What a joke. By then I needed the money, but the people would come to the counter and I’d hand them their order. Talk about fast food. I didn’t do it on purpose. I’d turn to them thinking they had already asked for chili and a double cheeseburger with everything on it and a medium-sized Dr. Pepper. I’d hand it to them before they had said a word and I’d say that will be $5.47. I mean, it troubled the customers. The manager put me on the drive-up window, but it was the same there, worse maybe, because I could lean over and see into their cars, and if you want to see people’s futures, just take a peek inside their cars. You barely need the gift.

  The day they finally killed Sadat, I was let go by Wendy’s and I realized the world was playing hardball with me then. No more this woman will never have three nickels, or this guy gives in to cholesterol at age forty-eight in a laundromat, no: now I was reading page one news, and I couldn’t stop.

  I tried. I took a job at a carnival in Winston-Salem. There I was Madame Razora, Palmreader, and I could read the palms. The job paid very well, though it was only for ten days. The secret to palm reading, if you want to know, is don’t look at the palm. Touch it with your fingertip, but while you do it look into the center of the person’s eyes. Most of my customers in Winston-Salem are going to outlive me, do better with marriage, and go gray slower, so it wasn’t too depressing. I was surprised to find two women who were going to marry the same man, but I figured they had something, so I never told them.

  But the headlines kept showing for me at night in the trailer I rented. I saw the helicopters burning
in the desert, which scared the shit out of me, because I didn’t know what the hell that was and I thought I was finally just having nightmares. And I saw that plane hit the bridge in Washington D.C.

  However, based on something I’d said to a young couple in Winston-Salem about their getting pregnant and having a job change, a man came to see me, the girl’s father, Mr. Edwardo Shepherd, editor in chief of The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World. He was a handsome gray-haired man of about fifty, and he said he wanted a “clairvoyant” for the paper’s annual predictions and zodiac column. Clairvoyant. I laughed at the word. Clear seeing. If it was just that, oh God. But the pay was right and so I went to work.

  I told them about Reagan and the election; I told them about the Russian spaceship breaking apart and where it would hit. He told me easy, lady. Nothing too hard. Those were his words, too hard, and they hit the nail on the head if anything does. He said, “Tell us something about Farrah Fawcett; tell us something about Reverend Moon.” And he started coming to my apartment, this was in Tallahassee where the paper was located, and I saw that he was married, anybody can see that much about any man, but I was shot through with headlines and I needed some comfort. Can I say that?

  I told him about John Lennon, maybe you remember our paper being investigated afterward, but I got a raise. Madame Zelena, Mistress of Doom. That was my byline. As I said, the Zelena part was all his, but “Mistress of Doom,” that’s in the target area all right. I was the Mistress of Doom for almost three years and—like I said—I hit ninety percent or so, missing on all the celebrity stuff right down the line.

  Then Edwardo wanted something big. Circulation was down. They’d moved us out of the counter racks in Seven-Eleven to the newsstand, and advertising pages were off twenty percent. Edwardo was upset because of all that and because he was having to discount even the full-page ads now, ads like LISTEN TO BROTHER RUDY which ran every issue, a full page of small print mainly about how BROTHER RUDY could make a Mason jar full of money appear on your kitchen table. So Edwardo wanted something big. He told me he wanted something about World War III, something with H-Bomb in the headline, something with “millions will die, millions will be hideously deformed.”

  We met in a cafe on Crystal Avenue, an Italian dive called Ferdinand and Isabella’s, and he told me he wanted something about Nuclear Holocaust. I smiled at him and told him Lady Di was going to have twin girls. He said again: “Something about THE BOMB, come on.” I said, “No deal.” He said, “Give me something with a mushroom cloud in it or take a walk.” I looked at him. Men can be ugly sometimes. I told him an airliner was going to take out this entire block before dessert. He stood, as I knew he would. He said, “You can see the future and you won’t tell me. You’re fired, Madame Zelena, good-bye.” I said to him, “You’re right. I can sometimes see the future, like now I can see your wife is going to come to know that you have a lover.”

  And though I held no particular rancor for Edwardo, in fact no particular feeling at all, when he left I called his wife. Just because you’re psychic, just because you can see the future, doesn’t mean you can’t make a little of it too.

  And that, except for my first real enjoyable train trip and an incident in Albuquerque where I stopped and told a little Mexican boy that his dog was asleep three blocks away in an alley, brings me here, to the brink of the future. Isn’t this a moment?

  These are our lives, essentially carrying us forward, but we’re only facing that way about half the time. All of us in this room except two couples and three girls (who are fairly certain), know where we’ll be tomorrow night. Who we’ll be with. What will be said. Many of us know what will not be said. But what is the past? I mean: I’d really like to know. Right now, tonight, my past seems to swirl before me like something I haven’t really had yet. Like I said, it’s the past that’s the mystery; the future is here too, but just a simple series of pleasurable chores.

  I can still see things in the same way as always. Somebody here has lost his wallet; I can see that. Should I tell him not to worry, that it fell out of his gray suit pants and is inside one of his fishing boots on the closet floor? No, that’s not for me to say.

  I’ve become—in these twelve years—an increasingly private person, whatever that means, and I face the future almost calmly. What do I see for me? A couple of good things. Some real good meals.

  I will die because of a swimming incident off the coast of La Paz, Mexico. Brushed by a gray whale, I will lose the skin from my left thigh and buttock. The whale will touch me in play. Two days later I will die from an unchecked staphylococcus infection in the La Plage Hotel, room 37, which opens on a veranda. The largest organism and the smallest will do me in.

  I will be in La Paz with a man who is in the audience tonight, a married man I haven’t yet met. I can feel that he loves me a little right now. I don’t blame him.

  We will be on an illicit honeymoon, that’s what he’ll call it.

  And how do I feel about the future? How do you feel? How do I feel about my death?—seeing it? I’m looking forward to the trip. I’ve never been to Mexico.

  It will be wonderful to see that whale again.

  THE TIME I DIED

  I READ a lot. I mean: I read everything. I always have. It used to really drive Grant crazy. My whole side of the bedroom was a hazard: stacks of pamphlets, magazines, papers, paperbacks, and about four dozen hardback books which I received from my book club and the library. But I love to read. Grant would say, “What’s in that damn book, anyway?” But he really didn’t want to know. I know this because several times I answered him. “Honey, this book is about Bud Sackett trying to deliver cattle to Santa Fe …” or “The woman in this article says she lost forty pounds of ugly fat by chewing each bite thirty-one times. …” But before I could finish the explanation, Grant was in the other room cranking the channels like he was trying to start an outboard motor.

  I read a lot of trash. I do. I read The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World from cover to cover. I’ve read all the stories about people coming back from the dead, and all twenty-one people have said about the same thing: there’s that white room and some floating and their relatives and most of the time some music. I have also read some fine books, such as Madame Bovary, the biography of Dorothy Kilgallen called Kilgallen, which my book club sent me, and a large book called The Gulag Archipelago, a book which scared the devil out of Grant. “What language are you reading now?” he said.

  Maybe I read too much. But I always felt it was better than drinking too much or chasing around. Later, that is what Grant got into. I suspected he was having troubles, and then I found out when he gave me herpes two. It’s a virus. He stopped coming home. I really started reading.

  I was reading fourteen hours a day. In one day I read Are You a Genius? Great American Mystery Stories (the whole volume), The Book of Lists II, and Frankenstein, which turned out to be different than I had ever thought. I was during this heavy reading period that Susan, my maid of honor, my best friend from high school, since before high school, called, and that led to how I died and why I’m in the hospital now.

  Susan has a great attitude. She got married in high school to Andrew Botts, one of the most popular guys in our class, and then about three years ago, Andrew split. He’s in California now, but Susan never let it get her down. She smiles about him like she knew it all along.

  She used to call me up and talk, and then sometimes I’d have her over for dinner with Grant and me. Grant didn’t like her, because he couldn’t figure her out; but it was okay, because he would eat and then go in the other room and crank the channels, and Susan and I would talk for three hours. In fact, I’d rather be with Susan, talking, than alone reading in bed. She’s a crazy woman and always has a new story about some new man in her life and what he’s trying to get her to do now. She can laugh way down in her throat for about a minute without taking a breath.

  So, when she called the last time she said she had heard abo
ut Grant leaving, and she laughed and said, “That’s the real facts of life, Linda,” which was exactly what she said at my wedding. Anyway, she said I was definitely going to stop reading for one night and go out for a night with the girls. I had been reading back through a stack of The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World at the time, and didn’t want to go, because I was reading a pretty good series on UFO’s, which have already picked up fifty-four people who have never been seen since and who are living better lives somewhere, according to their relatives and sometimes according to the sheriff. I was also rereading about the twenty-one people who had died and come back. Their stories all matched perfectly even though some of their stories were in different issues. It is their stories which really bother me, because now I have died and I know that there are twenty-one people who have fooled and lied to The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World. But, when Susan called, I decided to close the papers and go out. Sometimes Susan can be just the wild thing I need.

  When she picked me up in her Pinto, she told me we were going to a Daycare Fund Raiser at the Redwood Club, and that there would be a male stripper, and she laughed and blew cigarette smoke all over the windshield. I have read about male strippers in at least five magazines. The women all had good things to say in the articles, and in the pictures, the women looked like they were having a good time.

  It was twelve dollars at the door, and the woman stamped our hands with a little purple star. The Redwood Club is just a big barroom with a real low sparkling ceiling. Susan knew a lot of the women there and we joined a table with three of her friends near the front. We had been drinking a little vodka in the car, and we had some more, and it was just flat fun being half high out of the house with a room full of women who were just roaring and carrying on.