“See, you’re Captain Hook,” said Maxine, who just wouldn’t quit. “The crocodile just bit into your other leg, but then he let go. What are you afraid of now?”
“I’m not afraid of dying in some generic accident. I’m not phobic about tornados, banana peels, or freak gardening mishaps. I’m afraid of dying on a plane.” She told her she’d get herself checked out somewhere, get her ribs taped or whatever, and keep going. “I’ve heard good things,” she lied, “about Spokane.” She handed the phone back to the lummox. “If she calls back,” she told him, “hang up.”
A little while later he came back. The sky was beginning to lighten. “Ma’am, we still haven’t found that dead individual you told us about. Are you sure about what you saw?”
Amy sat up. “Look at me! I’m covered with blood that’s not my own. Of course I’m sure. She’s out there somewhere. I might have lost track of time. I might have wandered farther than I thought. Keep looking. Her name is Thelma Schoon, and she comes from Lincoln, Nebraska and she’s writing a book about it.” Amy’s eyes watered up. She really needed a decent stretch of sleep. “And she’s dead and she deserves to be found and buried, so keep looking.”
“No, I’m not!” came a voice behind her. Amy looked around and Thelma Schoon hobbled toward her, covered with dirt and ash and no blood. She still had two arms, one in a sling, and her hair had not escaped its bun. “What a night!” she said, kneeling down beside Amy.
Amy stared at Thelma Schoon. She had not felt so unmoored since New Year’s, when she had watched Holly Antoon back out of her driveway, waving like an old friend and shouting nonsensical thanks. Had she finally had some kind of cerebral event? She closed her eyes tightly and opened them again, just to make sure that she was really here on the hard ground next to a smoking train wreck in northern Montana: that the past year had actually happened; that she hadn’t stumbled into a birdbath and dreamed up three full seasons. Thelma Schoon took her hand. “I’ve been looking all over for you! There you are.”
“There we are,” said Amy. She looked down at herself. The length of her gown, neck to hem, was truly encrusted with somebody’s dark blood. Thank god. “I’ll admit,” she told the lummox, “I was wrong about the name, but I’m not wrong about the dead woman. You need to keep looking.”
Thelma didn’t shut up until the last batch of ambulances came. She told Amy and everybody else about all she had seen and heard during the long night, the people she’d met, the amazing, terrible, memorable sights. She regurgitated names of passengers and crew; she knew how many train cars had been completely destroyed and how many were still on the rails. She knew what freight the truck was carrying and that the driver, who was apparently at fault, had died on impact. If Thelma had found that woman in the field, she would have learned her full name and Social Security number and been able to lead rescuers to her precise location. Thelma was nice enough but tiresome, and she took too much pleasure in all the excitement. Amy decided she really didn’t like Thelma all that much.
Yet she had loved the dying woman. She might tell herself she hadn’t: that it had been a moment of insanity, of shock, that she had not been herself. She might claim that she had embraced the woman and seen her through to the end because she had been denied that privilege with Max. But she knew this wasn’t exactly true. Not fully. The moment had been both mysterious and transcendant. Amy went to take out her notebook, but of course it was gone, abandoned in what was left of her roomette.
She pulled the lummox aside. “I feel as though we almost know each other by now,” she said. This was true. He had been a constant through an endless and tumultuous night.
“I know what you mean,” he said, smiling. She could make out his features now: he was older than she had thought, and balding. She wondered if he were a lumberjack. Were there still lumberjacks?
“What is your name?”
“Franklin, ma’am.”
“Franklin, would you do me a favor?” Amy lowered her voice. “Would you make sure Miss Schoon and I are put on different ambulances? She’s tiring me out.”
“She is pretty chatty, isn’t she?”
They made her lie down on a stretcher, and they were going to kick out Alphonse, but Franklin interceded and helped load them both in. “By the way,” he said as they closed the doors, “we found her. Her name was Harriet Johnston.”
* * *
In exchange for a pencil and some sheets of paper, Amy let the medics check her pulse and stick an IV in her arm. She wrote Harriet Johnston. Had she actually used Thelma’s name on Harriet Johnston? How horrible. She imagined herself on her own deathbed, surrounded by weeping strangers, calling her Shirley, Veronica, Grammaw, Thelma Schoon. She hoped Harriet Johnston had had a sense of humor. She wrote All the doors were wide open when I left them. She was losing the words already. She wrote and you were rising. She wrote never, I never did. When the ambulance got to the highway, they turned the siren on.
She had been wondering when she was going to take in all that had happened. She had been expecting some sort of shift in perspective, perhaps a falling away of denial, an inrush of horrific detail, but she was beginning to understand that this would not happen, because there had been no denial, no resistance at all. She could remember the evening in an unbroken string, from waking up against the wall of her compartment to right now. When she was young, when she was middle-aged, the taking in of bad news had been arduous. She never subscribed to the seven stages theory; rather she had felt like a great amoeba having to deform itself around an object as big as she or bigger in order to ingest it and make it part of herself, and of course be changed to her core by the process. This time, though, none of that had been required. One damn thing after another had happened, she had been witness to and participant in catastrophe, and she had accepted it all without struggle, as though it were somehow old hat. Perhaps she had been rehearsing for it all her life. Perhaps she was over-rehearsed.
Her only aberration during that whole night was jumping to the absurd conclusion that an unrecognizable mortally injured woman was the only other passenger on the train whom she actually knew. How cheap, how convenient that had been. Poor storytelling on her part. She would have to remember it for use as an object lesson, should the topic of oh-so-handy coincidence arise in her next workshop session at the Birdhouse. “Do you see what I did there?” she would ask them. “I tried to make sense out of chaos, which is of course our job, but I got lazy.” They must have put something in the IV, because she was very sleepy. She jotted down some titles:
“You Were Rising”
“Great Big Liar”
“Lumberjack”
She folded up the paper, stuck it in the sleeve of her gown, and slept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
How I Write
They got back home before Thanksgiving but lay low throughout most of December. Ricky had taken great care of the place and asked no questions about the tour or the accident when he met her at the station. “We all kept up with your thrilling adventures,” he said, but didn’t say what that meant or prod her for thrilling details. He warned her that Carla planned to throw her a welcome-home bash. “I’ll put her off as long as I can,” he said, handing her the keys to car and house. “But you know it’s going to happen.”
A full week went by before she lost the sensation of being on a rocking, clacketing train. After a brief recuperation in a Montana hospital, they had explored Wyoming, Washington, and Oregon. Sometimes they had stopped in towns with no bookings, no bookstores, just to be alone. She had gotten her phone back from the Amtrak people, along with all of her miraculously unincinerated luggage, but she kept the phone off most days. “Text only,” she texted to Maxine, and that’s how they kept in touch during those weeks. At night, in motels and IHOPS, she wrote three stories, start to finish, and began a novel. Once home she continued writing and dealing with proofs of the new story collection. She changed the title from Birdbath Stories to Malignant Creativity.
After they’d been home for a week or so, Amy noticed strange cars cruising past her house, the drivers peering into her backyard. Some of them leaned out their windows with cameras. She wondered if they were desperate real estate agents, but the Blaines explained that Alphonse was a local celebrity now, that a TV station had actually called them for anecdotes about the heroic basset, and that, to their credit, they had refused. Amy worried that he might be stolen, but after a couple of weeks the excitement died down. The heroic basset himself was happy to be home. Ricky had planted some winter squash in the raised garden, and for some reason Alphonse liked to take the afternoon sun amid the pumpkins and butternuts.
She put Carla off as long as possible, which turned out to be easier than she had imagined since the Birdhouse had apparently gotten along just fine without her. In her prolonged absence they had not hired any life coaches or gurus but had learned to function independently. Carla told her they had exciting news but that she’d have to come to the Christmas party to hear it. “We’ll do a party and dinner and last class, all in one,” she said. Amy said she didn’t have time to read any of their work.
“Not that kind of class,” said Carla. “Just, you know, a seriously last class.” She cleared her throat. “We know you’re busy now,” she said. “We know everything’s changed.”
No, it hasn’t, Amy wanted to say. I still have time to teach you once in a while. But then she understood that everything had changed for them. Carla wasn’t as gushy as her old self: she sounded her age; she sounded busy, distracted by the demands of her own life. Maybe she was growing up.
* * *
Though Carla instructed her not to bring presents, at the last minute Amy decided to take them the Norfolk pine they had bought her last year, the one she had been carrying on the day she fell. That it still lived was a miracle: its lower branches had fallen off months before, but it was taller than she remembered. Ricky had rescued it from the full sun of the raised garden where she had abandoned it, and through the fall he must have fed and watered it back from the dead. It deserved a decent home. She stopped on the way to La Jolla to buy tinsel, a star, and two blue glass ornaments, and decorated the tree on Carla’s doorstep before knocking. It looked exactly like the tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Amy was just thinking this when Harry B opened the door and said it.
Carla’s interior décor had changed dramatically. Amy had expected as much, and had amused herself on the way down trying to imagine which Disneyland theme she’d have embraced this time. Would there be waterfalls? Mine shafts? Would she have hung vines from the beams so people could swing from room to room? Not quite. The living room had been transformed from an enchanted Tiki cave to what looked rather like an airport lounge. All the boulders, brooks, and carnivorous plants had vanished, and in their place were clusters of contemporary sectionals, all the color of weathered bone, and banks of computer stations against the two inner walls. The stations were defined by acoustic partitions. There were coffee machines and a water cooler. “Is this Tomorrowland?” she asked Harry B.
“That was my first thought also,” he said, handing her a drink, “but it’s actually a functioning writing space.”
“They look like office cubicles,” she said. “Do people actually use them?”
“Honest to god,” said Harry under his breath. “They sign up for blocks of time. There’s even a faction that wants full cubicles, so no one can see in.”
“Like a job!”
“Like a corporate job. Carla’s the office manager in spades. She’s got it set up so they can get online, but anybody caught playing Angry Birds loses the space for a week.”
Amy opened her mouth to say, “That’s insane,” and then realized that it wasn’t. It was brilliant. Carla had come up with an anti-retreat, where writing was not an ascetic calling but a white-collar task measurable in logged hours. “I’ll bet they’re producing like mad,” she said, and Harry held his palms apart as if describing a huge fish.
Carla swept up, tailored and beige, followed by caterers with trays of hors d’oeuvres. “There you are!” she said. “I have so much to tell you!” Carla and Harry B walked Amy to a chair in a nest of sectionals, and without so much as a snap of her fingers people gathered around her, pushing furniture from all corners of the room, and in minutes everyone was seated comfortably before her. Patrice Garrotte startled her with his presence: she had known he was working with them, but it was so odd to see him here. In her mind he was always on a plane. Kurt Robetussien, Ricky, Tiffany, Dr. Surtees, and Brie Spangler were all present, and there were six or seven strangers, each of whom Carla introduced and Amy instantly forgot, so stunned was she by Carla’s self-assurance, the ease with which she commanded the room. She had dropped a ton of weight and her helmet of hair was of a color found in nature. Was this a good thing?
“First of all,” Carla said, “Harry’s getting us incorporated. Also we’ve decided to go with a different name.”
“Different from what?”
“Well, you’ll remember that—see, Harry, I told you!”
“Carla wanted to do a PowerPoint presentation,” Harry said, “and I talked her out of it.”
“It would have shown the original name, Croatoan, the Missing Writer’s Colony, and the steps by which we came to realize that a less … ironic … name would garner more positive attention.”
“Carla, this is your business. I don’t have anything to do with it.”
“Well, but you came up with the name, and I didn’t want to offend you.”
And yet you have, thought Amy, with your ridiculous corporateness. What have you done with Carla Karolak? “‘Croatoan’ was an ironic suggestion on my part,” she said. “At any rate it’s your retreat.”
“But it’s not a retreat,” Carla said, leaning forward, and in her eyes Amy finally got a glimpse of Carla’s old abandon, that endearing willingness to take an idea and run off a cliff with it. “See, that’s what got me thinking. You know, how you always make fun of solitary, windswept writers?”
“I do?”
“Yeah, you know, with their oak tables and their, I don’t know, hurricane lamps and handmade foolscap—”
“And their precious little rituals,” said Tiffany, “and their special pencils.”
“I don’t think she said ‘handmade foolscap,’” said Dr. Surtees. “It was ‘homemade foolscap notebooks.’”
“Same difference,” said Tiffany.
“World of difference,” said Dr. Surtees. “If you made your own paper, you’d stink up the whole house with pulp.”
“Excuse me,” said Amy, “if I ever said anything like that, it wasn’t for posterity. Good lord, were you guys taking notes?”
“We don’t have to,” said Ricky. “We’ve got podcasts.”
She did sort of remember riffing on writing rituals and monastic cells, just variations on what she had already said during that first NPR gig, but had thought that because nothing was written down it would instantly vaporize. But they had podcasts and YouTube and they knew how to use them. Still, wasn’t it less onerous to glance back over a page than to force yourself to listen to it or watch it more than once? How did they have time to memorize her foolishness? Were they multitasking? Did these people—did other people—listen to her droning on pretentiously about literary pretensions while journaling, tweeting, and shucking sugar peas?
“We’re calling it Inspiration Point,” Carla said, slipping a card out of the pocket of her silk blouse. It read Inspiration Point!
“Wouldn’t Exclamation Point! be catchier?”
“See,” said Ricky to Carla, “I told you.”
“Well,” said Carla, blushing, trying not to look devastated, “we have a number of other promising alternatives.” She lowered her head and fished out some more cards.
“Inspiration Point is just fine,” Amy said. It wasn’t, but she was anxious to make amends for trying to bring Carla to heel, as though she had no right to take her place in the world. Am
y despised bullies, and here she was, being one. “I’d leave off the punctuation if it were me, but you have to do what you think is best.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely,” said Amy. “Now, tell me more. Tell me everything.”
* * *
Everything was a lot. Inspiration Point—IP—had thirty members, six living on premises, all of whom paid plenty for the right to commit themselves to twenty cubicle hours per week, minimum. At first, Carla wanted a weekly page quota, but Harry B talked her out of it, so that the only requirement was what Carla called “butts in seats” twenty hours per. Failure to log these hours or to obey rules against time-wasting computer games meant instant one-week suspension; two failures meant a year-length expulsion with no refunds. During the first weeks two paying members were drummed out, and the rest, seeing that Carla wasn’t kidding, knuckled under, and in no time word of mouth brought in four more, and soon there was a long waiting list. “We considered expanding,” Harry said, “but decided on a limit of thirty for the time being, until we see the results.”
The results so far were impressive. Kurt R had finished his cancer nurse novel. He thought it was pretty good for a first novel (“It’s wonderful,” said Brie Spangler, sitting beside him, her hand on his shoulder), but he figured he’d never find an agent for it unless he wrote something cheerier, so he had started a comic novel about a small-town emergency room. Brie Spangler said it was hilarious.
Brie had abandoned her working-class car-thief novel and was “working on short fiction” and mum about her progress, which Amy guessed was nil, though she was “loving the atmosphere” of Inspiration Point and talking it up on the radio. Amy hoped Kurt R appreciated that she was paying, both in money and in time, to be his besotted cheerleader.
Patrice was working on a new story, “not about my mother,” so good for him.
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