All Around Atlantis

by Deborah Eisenberg

  Her mother would have told her. Francie snatched open a drawer and out flew the fact of her mother’s slippery, pinkish heap of underwear. Her mother’s toothbrush sat next to the mirror in a glass. In the mirror, past the fingerprint, her mother’s eyes lay across her own reflection like a mask.

  The hospital floated in the middle of a vast ocean of construction, or maybe it was demolition; a nation in itself, of which all humans were, at every moment, potential citizens. The inevitable false move, and it was wham, onto the gurney, with workers grabbing smocks and gloves to plunge into the cavity of you, and the lights that burned all night. Outside this building you lived as though nothing were happening to you that you didn’t know about. But here, there was simply no pretending.

  Cynthia had come up the hill, Mrs. Peck had sent Francie home, and now here she was—completely lost; she’d come in the wrong entrance. People passed, in small groups, not touching or speaking. The proliferating corridors and rotundas bloomed with soft noises—chiming, and disembodied announcements, and the muted tapping of canes and rubber shoes and walkers. The ceilings and floors were the same color and had the same brightness: metal winked, signaling between wheelchairs and bedrails. Francie tried to suppress the notion, which had popped up from somewhere like a groundhog, that her mother was still alive, lost here somewhere herself.

  Two unfamiliar nurses sat at a desk at the mouth of the wing where Section E, Room 418, was. In their crisp little white hats they appeared to be exempt from error. They looked up as Francie approached, and their faces were blank and tired, as if they knew Francie through and through—as if they knew everything there was to know about this girl in the short, filmy dress and motorcycle jacket and electric-green socks, who was coming toward them with so much difficulty, as if the air were filled with invisible restraints.

  But, as it turned out, when Francie tried to explain herself, using (presumably) key, she thought, words, like “Kathryn McIntyre,” and “Room 418,” and “dead,” even then neither of the nurses seemed to understand. “Did you want to speak to a doctor?” one of them said.

  A tiny, hot beading of sweat sprang out all over Francie. From the moment she was born people had been happy to tell her what to do, down to the most minute detail; Eds. Clarke & Melton knew just what was happening; there were admonitions and exhortations plastered all over the walls—this is how to behave, this is what to think, this is how to think it, that’s then, this is now, this is where to put your sock—but no one had ever said one little thing that would get her through any five given minutes of her life!

  She stared at the nurse who had spoken: Say it, Francie willed her, but the nurse instead turned her attention to a form attached to a clipboard. “Is Miss Healy around?” Francie asked after a minute.

  The fact was, Francie would not have recognized Miss Healy; she’d hardly noticed the broad-faced, slightly clumsy-looking girl who’d been changing the water in a vase of flowers as Francie had listened to her mother describe, with somber gloating, the damage to her body, the shock of finding herself on the ice with her pork chop and canned peaches and so forth strewn around her, the pitiable little trickle of milk she had watched flow from the ruined carton into the filthy slush before she understood that she couldn’t move.

  “She never complained,” Miss Healy was saying, in a melancholy, slightly adenoidal voice. “She was such a pleasant person. You could tell the terrible pain she was in, but she never said a word.” Miss Healy directed her mournful recital toward Francie’s elbow, as if she were in danger of being derailed by Francie’s face. “And when the people from her office brought candy and flowers? She was just so polite. Even though you could see those things were not what she wanted.”

  Oh, great. Who but her mother could get someone to say that her pain was obvious but that she never complained? Who but her mother could get someone to say she was polite even though everyone could tell she didn’t want their gifts? No doubt about it, the body they’d carted off almost a day and a half ago from Room 418 had been her mother’s—Miss Healy had just laid waste, in her squelchy voice, to that last wisp of hope.

  “The thing is,” Francie said, “what am I supposed to do?”

  “To do?” Miss Healy said. Her look of suffering was momentarily whisked away. “I mean, unfortunately, your mother’s dead.”

  “No, I know,” Francie said. “I get that part. I just don’t know what to do.”

  Miss Healy looked at her. Clearly Francie was turning out to be, unlike her mother, not a pleasant person. “Well, you’ll want to grieve, of course,” Miss Healy said, as if she were remembering a point from a legal document. “Everyone needs closure.” She frowned, then unexpectedly addressed, after all, Francie’s problem. “I’ll call downstairs so you can see her.”

  Fading smells of bodies clung to the air like plaintive ghosts, their last friendly overtures vanquished by the stronger smells of disinfectants. An indecipherable muttering came from other ghosts, sequestered in a TV suspended from the ceiling. Outside the window huge, predatory machines prowled among mounds of trash.

  Miss Healy returned. “Mrs. McIntyre isn’t downstairs. I’m really sorry—I guess they’ve sent her on.”

  They? On? If only there were someone around to take over. Anyone. Jessica, even. At least Jessica would be able to ask some sensible question. “On…” Francie began uncertainly, and Jessica gave her a little shove. “On where?”

  “Oh,” Miss Healy said. “Well, I mean, does your family use any in particular?”

  Francie stared: Where would Jessica even begin with that one?

  “Does your family have a particular one they like,” Miss Healy explained. “Mortuary.”

  “It’s just me and mother,” Francie said.

  Miss Healy nodded, as if this confirmed her point. “Uh-huh. So they’d have sent her on to whatever place was specified by the next of kin.”

  Francie felt Jessica start to giggle. “It’s just me and mother,” Francie said again.

  “Just whoever your mother put down on the AN37-53,” Miss Healy said. “Not literally the next of kin necessarily—she couldn’t have used you, for instance, because you’re a minor. But just, if there’s no spouse, people might put down someone at their office, say. Or she might have used that nice friend of hers who came to visit once, Mrs. Dougherty.”

  Yargh. It wasn’t enough that her mother had died—no, they had to toss her out, into that huge, melted mob, the dead, who couldn’t speak for themselves, who were too indistinguishable to be remembered, who could be used to prove anything, who could be represented any way at all! “My mother hates everyone at her office,” Francie said. “My mother hates Mrs. Dougherty. Mother calls Mrs. Dougherty that buggy Irish slut.”

  Miss Healy drew back. “Well, I guess your mom wasn’t expecting to die, exactly, when she filled out that form,” she said, and then recovered herself. “There, now. I’ll call down again. Even this crazy morgue has files, I guess.”

  Out the window a wrecking ball swung toward a solitary wall. Miss Healy hesitated. She seemed to be waiting for something. “I called that lady at the school,” she said. She stood looking at Francie, and Francie realized that she and Miss Healy must be almost the same age. “I just didn’t figure there’d be some other way you’d know.”

  “How did mother get all the way out here?” Francie asked the man who greeted her.

  The man’s little smile intensified the ruefulness of his expression. “We get a lot of folks out this way,” he said. “You might be surprised.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Francie said. “I meant I was surprised.”

  The man jumped slightly, as if Francie had gummed him on the ankle, and then smiled ruefully again. “Serving all faiths,” he explained, gesturing at a sign on the wall. “Serving all faiths,” Francie read. “Owned and operated by Luther and Theodore T. Ade. When you’re in need, call for Ade.” “Also,” the man added, “competitive pricing. But mainly, first in the phone book.”


  He disappeared behind a door, and Francie jogged from foot to foot to warm herself—it had been a long walk from the last stop on the bus line. She looked around. Not much to see: a counter holding some file folders, a calendar and a mirror on the wall, several chairs, and a round table on which lay a dog-eared copy of Consumer Reports. So this was where her mother had got to—nowhere at all.

  “Won’t be another minute.” The man was back in the room. “Teddy T.’s just doing the finishing touches.”

  Finishing touches? Francie blanched—she’d almost forgotten what this place was. “You’re not using lipstick, are you?” she managed to say. “Mother hated it.”

  The man glanced rapidly at the mirror and then back at Francie.

  “Lipstick,” Francie said. “On her.”

  “‘On her…’” the man said. As he stared at Francie, the room lost its color and flattened; swarming black dots began to absorb the table and the counter and the mirror. “I’m very sorry if that’s what you had in mind, Miss, ah…” dots streamed out of the dot man to say. The riffling of file folders amplified into a deafening splash of dots, and then Francie heard, “I’m very, very sorry, because those were definitely not the instructions. I’ve got the fax right here—from your dad, right? Yup, Mr. McIntyre.”

  Francie’s vision and hearing cleared before her muscles got a grip on themselves. She was on the floor, splayed out, confusingly, as her mother must have been on the ice, and the man was kneeling next to her, holding a glass of water, although, also confusingly, her hair and clothing were drenched—sweat, she noted, amazed.

  “O.K. now?” the man asked. Next to him was a cardboard box, about two feet square, tied up with twine.

  Francie nodded.

  “Happens,” the man said, sympathetically.

  Francie finished the water slowly and carefully while the man fetched a little wooden handle and affixed it to the twine around the box. Things had gone far beyond misrepresentation now.

  “And here’s the irony,” the man said. “We deliver.”

  All night long, Francie fell, plummeting through the air. When she finally managed to pry herself awake with the help of the pale wands of light along the blinds, she found herself sprawled forcefully back on her mattress, aching, as if she’d been hurled from a great height. On the kitchen floor was the cardboard box. Francie hefted it experimentally—yesterday it had been intolerably heavy; this morning it was intolerably light.

  O.K., first in the phone book, true enough. (“See display ad, page 182.”) “Hi,” Francie said when the man answered. “This is Francie McIntyre. The girl who fainted yesterday? Could you—” For an instant, Miss Healy stood in front of her again, looking helpless. “First of all,” Francie said. “I mean, thanks for the water. But second of all, could you give me my father’s address, please? And, I guess, his name.”

  Kevin McIntyre—not all that amazing, once you got your head around the notion that he happened to be alive. And he lived on a street called West Tenth, in New York City. Francie looked out the window to the place where there had been for some years now a silently shrieking crowd and a puddle of blood, into which long, splotty raindrops were now falling. Strange—it was raining into the puddle, but at the level of the window it was snowing.

  In the closet she found an old plastic slicker. She took it from the hanger and wrapped it around the cardboard box, securing it roughly with tape. Yes, everything had to be just right. But the only thing she’d actually said to Francie in all these sixteen years was a lie.

  Francie looked around at the bluish stillness. “Hello hello,” she called. Was that her voice? Was that her mother’s silence, fading? What had become of everything that had gone on here? “Hello hello,” she said. “Hello hello hello hello…”

  The bus ticket cost Francie eighteen dollars. Which left not all that much of the seventy-three and a bit that she’d saved up, fortunately, to get her back to school and, in fact, Francie thought, to last for the rest of her life. “But, hey,” Jessica returned just long enough to point out, “you’ll be getting free therapy.”

  Francie put her box on the overhead rack and scrambled to a window seat. West Tenth Street. West of what? The tenth of how many? How on earth was she going to find her way around? If only her mother had let her go last year when Jessica invited her to spend Thanksgiving in New York with her family. But Francie’s mother had been able to picture Jessica’s mother just as easily as Francie had been able to. “Out of the question,” she’d said.

  “…if there’s no spouse…” So, her mother must have used his name on that form! They must never have got a divorce. Could he be a bigamist? Some people were. And he might think Francie was coming to blackmail him. He might decide to kill her right then and there—just reach over and grab a…a…

  Well, one thing—he wasn’t living on the street; she had his address. And he wasn’t totally feebleminded; he’d sent a fax. Whatever he was, at least what he wasn’t was everything except that. And the main thing he wasn’t, for absolute certain, was a guy who’d been mashed by a bus.

  “Would you like a hankie?” the lady in the seat next to Francie’s asked, and Francie realized that she had wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve. “I have one right here.”

  “Oh, wow,” Francie said gratefully, and blew her nose on the handkerchief the lady produced from a large, shabby cloth sack on her lap.

  Despite the shabbiness of the sack, Francie noticed, the lady was tidy. And pretty. Not pretty, really, but exact—with exact little hands and an exact little face. “Do you live in New York?” she asked Francie.

  “I’ve never even been there,” Francie said. “My roommate from school invited me to visit once, but my mother wouldn’t let me go.” Jessica’s family had a whole apartment building to themselves, Jessica had told her; she’d called it a “brownstone.” It was when Francie had foolishly reported this interesting fact that her mother put her foot down. “Actually,” Francie added, “I think my mother was afraid. We had a giant fight about it.”

  “A mother worries, of course,” the lady said. “But it’s a lovely city. People tend to have exaggerated fears about New York.”

  “Yeah,” Francie said. “Well, I guess maybe my mother had exaggerated fears about a lot of things. She—” The box! Where was the box? Oh, there—on the rack. Francie’s heart was beating rapidly; clashing in her brain were the desire to reveal and the desire to conceal what had become, in the short course of the conversation, a secret. “Do you live in New York?” she asked.

  “Technically, no,” the lady said. “But I’ve spent a great deal of happy time there. I know the city very well.”

  Francie’s jumping heart flipped over. “Have you ever been to West Tenth Street?” she asked.

  “I have,” the lady said.

  Francie didn’t dare look at the lady. “Is it a nice street?” she asked carefully.

  “Very nice,” the lady said. “All the streets are very nice. But it seems a strange day to be going there.”

  “It’s strange for me,” Francie said loudly. “My mother died.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” the lady said. “My mother died as well. But evidently no one was hurt in the accident.”

  “Huh?” Francie said.

  “Amazing as it seems,” the lady said, “I believe no one was hurt. Although you’d think, wouldn’t you, that an accident of that sort—a blimp, simply sailing into a building…”

  Francie felt slightly sickened—she wasn’t going to have another opportunity to tell someone for the first time that her mother had died, to learn what that meant by hearing the words as she said them for the first time. “How could a blimp just go crashing into a building?” she said crossly.

  “These are things we can’t understand,” the lady said with dignity.

  Oops, Francie thought—she was really going to have to watch it; she kept being mean to people, and just completely by mistake.

  “‘How could such-and-suc
h a thing happen?’ we say,” the lady said. “As if this moment or that moment were fitted together, from…bits, and one bit or another bit might be some type of mistake. ‘There’s the building,’ people say. ‘It’s a building. There’s the blimp. It’s a blimp.’ That’s the way people think.”

  Francie peered at the lady. “Wow…” she said, considering.

  “You see, people tend to settle for the first explanation. People tend to take things at face value.”

  “Oh, definitely,” Francie said. “I mean, absolutely.”

  “But a blimp or a building cannot be a mistake,” the lady said. “Obviously. A blimp or a building are evidence. Oh, goodness—” she said as the bus slowed down. She stood up and gave her sack a little shake. “Here I am.”

  “Evidence…” Francie frowned; Cynthia’s red jacket flashed against the snow. “Evidence, of, like…the future?”

  “Well, more or less,” the lady said, a bit impatiently, as the bus stopped in front of a small building. “Evidence of the present, really, I suppose. You know what I mean.” She reached into her sack and drew out some papers. “You seem like a very sensitive person—I wonder if you’d be interested in learning about my situation. This is my stop, but you’re welcome to the document. It’s extra.”

  “Thank you,” Francie said, although the situation she’d really like to learn about, she thought, was her own. “Wait—” The lady was halfway down the aisle. “I’ve still got your handkerchief—”

  “Just hold on to it, dear,” the lady called back. “I think it’s got your name on it.”

  The manuscript had a title, The Triumph of Untruth: A Society That Denies the Workings of the World Puts Us at Ever Greater Risk. “I’d like to introduce myself,” it began. “My name is Iris Ackerman.”

  Hmm, Francie thought: Two people with situations, sitting right next to each other. Coincidence? She glanced up. The sickening thing was, there were a lot of people on this bus.