Enduring
Page 51
But instead he asks, “What is your favorite story about Dawny that has never made it into his books?” This last question she will be loath to answer, declaring that she will only answer it after Dawny is dead.
“But what if he survives you?” the professor will protest.
“He won’t,” she declares.
“Do you think the only reason you’re still alive at the age of one hundred and twenty-one is that Dawny has granted you immortality?”
Latha will not be able to prevent a scoff escaping her lips. “Didn’t you ever ask him that?” she will want to know.
“Several times,” Brian Walter will answer. “The best answer I ever recorded was, ‘I may have created her, but I am not in charge of her.’”
“Well-spoken,” Latha will say. “How would you feel if you knew someone was in charge of you?”
“Helpless,” he will admit. And his senseo will reverse its direction and record all the lineaments of his face.
“Turn that thing off,” Latha will request, “and let me show you how to quilt.”
For such an old coot, he will be a quick study, and will soon be stitching almost as well as the George whom he will have replaced. But he will keep his senseo running, hovering and snooping, this day and the next and the next, and before his stock of 3DTV tape is all used up, he will have enough footage to be edited into a respectable film, which will answer such tricky questions as “What have you learned about yourself in the last year that you couldn’t have learned in your first one hundred and twenty-one years?” and “What do you still feel passionate(ly) about?” and “How long do you intend to live?” and “What are your daily routines?”
Instead of requiring her to answer the last question, he suggests that he be allowed to leave in her presence a Questcamera, the sort of top-of-the-line free-floating senseo that can follow her around wherever she goes all day long from get-up to lie-down. He will show her how to turn it off during moments of privacy, such as using the toilet. She will not mind its watching her get dressed for the day. She will always dress slowly. One of the problems of living so long is that you outlive your clothing. Latha’s few favorite dresses will be worn out, threadbare, faded, but they will still fit, and she will go on wearing them until they disintegrate. In the kitchen she will pour herself a cup from the automatic self-cleaning coffeemaker that turns itself on at the same time each morning, brewing a Colombian roast from beans that came not from Colombia but some factory in Indiana. Her cereal will have already poured itself into a bowl and the fridge will have already poured milk over it and sliced a banana over it, so all she will have to do is sit and eat it, scanning the morning news on the readmaster. She will also eat one-quarter of a cantaloupe that the fridge will have sliced and placed into another bowl. The pet-feeder will have already measured out a morning ration for her cats and dogs, who will have finished eating long before she will have, and will be loafing in the shade of the trees and the dogtrot. Brian’s Questcamera will follow her out to her garden, where she will be seen mostly inspecting the work that will have already been done by her Gardenmaster, a robomachine which plants, cultivates, weeds, and harvests. Although she will occasionally miss the sweaty work of honest toil in the garden, she will realize that perhaps she is too old for it. The Questcamera and the Gardenmaster will not speak the same language and will not like each other and she will be relieved when they will go their separate ways.
The Questcamera will, however, fall in love with her cats, stalking them while they are stalking, pouncing when they pounce, beating them in staring matches, and affectionately bumping heads with them. Boastfully, the machine will chase birds the cats cannot reach, but as if to get even, the cats will snatch at fish in the creek, and when the Questcamera tries to do this, it will get all wet and Brian will have to fix it.
Every night the Questcamera will follow Latha to bed and remain alert until she dozes off. It will be curious about what books she is reading, and will read over her shoulder. But before putting out the light, she will need to visit the bathroom and will turn off the Questcamera while she sits patiently and recites to herself:
Tinkle, tinkle, little pee.
How I wonder if I be.
If I be enough to keep,
I must pee before I sleep.
Fortunately for posterity, although the Questcamera’s eye will be shut, its ear will still be open and it will catch and remember this ditty, Latha’s sole contribution to the world of poetry.
Before the quilters will have given up their needles and returned to more manly pursuits, each of them will select and supervise the piecing of his own personal burial quilt, and Brian will take back with him to St. Louis a lovely quilt in the so-called crazy quilt pattern, which, he will be heard to maintain, is symbolic not only of his life but also of this book. Possibly he will not ever be buried in it, because it will not be too many more years before medical science, with some help from Vernon Ingledew, will eradicate death. Even before the total abolition of death, or rather the beginning of the universal program of voluntary leave-taking, medical science, again with some help from Vernon Ingledew and his co-conspirator Day Whittacker, will have discovered and perfected the age-reversal process, whereby everyone, if they will so choose, can grow younger instead of older. Latha will not so choose. Records will no longer be kept, but the Guinness Book will have gone out of print for years, and no one will know if Latha is the oldest woman on earth.
But as she will have said, she will outlive her creator, who, like Hank Ingledew and George Dinsmore and countless others, will breathe his last at the age of eighty-six. That last breath will be with difficulty, owing to pneumonia, which will have plagued him periodically for years and which took away his mentor, William Styron, in 2006. He will use that last breath to whisper into the ear of his beloved wife Kim his parting sentiments and also a reminder that Latha and the quilters will have already determined that the remainder of the Enduring book can be readily composed by the reader.
Some of those readers will have already turned out the light and tried to sleep. Others will first, before turning out the light, want to visit their bathrooms for the recitation of Latha’s ditty. Still others will insist that they want to remain awake long enough to read the story of a “visit” that Latha will receive, via the high technology senseophone, which enables us to feel literally in the presence of the caller. The woman will not be age-reversed and will appear to be as old as Latha herself. She will declare that her name is Rachel Rafferty, and that she had known Latha very well during her confinement to the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum.
“But,” Latha will protest, all of it coming back to her, “you aren’t real.”
“Who is?” Rachel will say. “But I must admit that this new senseophone my triple-great grandson gave me for Christmas makes you so real I could reach right out and touch you.”
“But,” Latha will say again. “But Dr. Kaplan convinced me you were entirely in my imagination.”
“Kaplan!” Rachel will exclaim as if it were a dirty word. “That asshole wouldn’t have known I was a figment if I’d have put out for him. Kaplan and his phobias! There ought to be a word for a phobia of making someone happy.”
Latha will reach out to lay her hand on Rachel’s arm but will discover, as all of us will have at one time or another when using the senseophone, that it is only air. Still, the woman will be speaking so clearly, and it will have been so long since Latha last experienced any sort of hallucination, that she will begin to believe that the woman really is Rachel, who was her dearest friend at the asylum and who kept her from sooner going over the brink.
“Where are you calling from?” Latha will ask. The woman will appear to have a very long body, and Latha will recall that she had been a star basketball player who had got into serious trouble for fondling her minister during a baptism.
“I’m in New Orleans,” the woman will say. “Where on earth are you? I’ve been trying for years to find you.”
&nb
sp; “I’m in a place called Stay More, Arkansas,” Latha will tell her, “which used to be my hometown, if you remember, but isn’t a town any more, just a place.”
“Are you well and happy?” Rachel will ask.
“Oh yes, I have no complaints,” Latha will declare, “except that they waited so long to invent a cure for death, and so many people I loved have died off.”
“Same here,” Rachel will say. “But now we’ve got each other, so let’s make the most of it.”
They will make the most of that call. For hours. They will reminisce about what a terrible place the asylum was, although Nurse Richter was a nice person until she ran away with Dr. Silverstein, and Betty Betty was a lot of fun. They will tell each other most of what has happened to them, beginning with how they got out of the asylum and everything since. From the distance of all these years, even the campus of the asylum will seem idyllic, with that pond and all those flowers. Latha will tell her to be sure and order a copy of a book called Enduring, because Rachel is in it. “I’ve known the guy who wrote it all of his life, and in fact he was buried here at the Stay More cemetery. You must come up and visit sometime.”
“I’ll do that when they invent teleportation,” Rachel says.
“At this rate, it won’t be long,” Latha says, and both women will laugh.
But the book will not end with the sound of their laughter.
It will not end with Latha going to bed later that night and dreaming of Rachel.
It will not end with somebody walking off into the sunset, or of an opened door about to close.
It will not end with an automobile driving off, or a train whistle blowing as the train pulls out (indeed, all surface travel will have ended years before).
It will not end with the sound of the spring on a screen door stretching and twanging.
It will not end with an invitation to stay more. It will not even end with an essay on how Latha will have always known the meaning of the town’s name and will have heeded it, and will still be heeding it.
It will not end with a goodbye, or a farewell or a godspeed or a catch you later. It will not end with any sort of valedictory.
It will not end.
About the Author
Donald Harington
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers.
His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for twenty-one years.
His first novel, The Cherry Pit, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published fourteen other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists.
He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. In 2006, he was awarded the inaugural Oxford American award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (Entertainment Weekly).
Table of Contents
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
Chapter thirty-nine
Chapter forty
Chapter forty-one
Chapter forty-two
Chapter forty-three
Chapter forty-four
Chapter forty-five
Chapter forty-six
Chapter forty-seven
Chapter forty-eight
Chapter forty-nine
Chapter fifty
About the Author
Table of Contents
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
Chapter thirty-nine
Chapter forty
Chapter forty-one
Chapter forty-two
Chapter forty-three
Chapter forty-four
Chapter forty-five
Chapter forty-six
Chapter forty-seven
Chapter forty-eight
Chapter forty-nine
Chapter fifty
About the Author