by Joy Williams
“You’re the one who’s scared,” Willie said. “You shouldn’t be scared.” She clung to his white shirt, which was falling with her in her eyes. “If I died, would you follow me?” Willie asked.
“How could I follow you. I wouldn’t know you.” She was falling, there was no sense to it. “I don’t know any dead people,” she said. It seemed to her a failing, even somewhat disrespectful.
“We’ve used each other up here,” Willie said.
“No,” Liberty said faintly.
When they had been younger still, Willie’s mother had told them about death, and she made it sound so exciting they had wondered aloud if it was as much fun to keep on living. And Doris had said, Why of course it was. You had to get the living over with first. The important thing was to let God use you up every day. It you struggled against Him and didn’t allow Him to use you up, then the next day couldn’t be used up either, nor the day after that and you’d always be left with less than a whole life to get rid of.
“You still think it’s an amazing thing to be able to die,” Liberty said. “There are things that are a lot harder, almost everything.” She tore the scarf from the shade, but his face appeared the same to her, bony and known, a hungry face which seemed to crave nothing.
“I’m free,” he said, “and you’re free, but now, not later. I’ve always wanted it this way, and haven’t you really? And Mama’s God won’t have a single part to play in this, that God she thinks she knows so well.” He lay down beside her, cupping her face in his hands. His breath was sweet. “I’ve never believed in anything,” he said, “except you and me.”
They talked each other through that night so that in the morning they were slick, brand-new twins at last, sliding out of the same dark and purling womb of incoherent happiness. They talked their way out of that night right into the dawn where the world pulled back in golden halves like a peach does from a pit, disclosing the pit’s dark and ragged heart.
“You know what I’ve had all these years?” Willie said. “Your Daddy’s pills. He gave them to my Daddy when he was working on his teeth, for the pain, but you know Daddy, he wouldn’t reduce by a twinge the discomfort he felt was his to bear, and you know too that things never strike him as being suspicious, only people, and so he kept them. Mama moved them around so much she’d forgotten where they were by the time I had them. There are a lot of them, but there’s still probably not enough. And they’re old, so they’re not as strong either.”
“We want them strong,” Liberty said.
He showed them to her. There were black capsules with slim red bands. There were pink capsules full of scarlet grains. There were plump pills that looked like matrons in pancake make-up, and there were skinny, reckless ones that looked fast as race cars. A silent instrumental orchestra of pills, each containing its own dreams and intentions. A circus of pills, each containing its bears and tigers, its glittering globes and toothful acrobats. There were Miltowns and Equanils, Serax and Tranxene. All the pills had real names and then they had other names, like everything else. The other names, the names they had in Blossum, were Christmas Trees and Bluebirds, Rainbows and Green Dragons. The other names, like everything’s other name, suggested more light, more air, something furious and beautiful.
The new day brought a sky that was a cloudless ashen blue and soon the air began to click once more with the heat, with the clicking secretive language of heat.
Willie went off early to Blossum. Liberty tried to talk to the baby. The baby, she thought, knew nothing, but understood a lot, but the baby wasn’t listening to her. The baby wasn’t going to have anything more to do with her. The baby had picked the wrong person all right! Liberty tried to explain things to the baby as Willie had been explaining things to her, but this did not intrigue the baby. Liberty thought that the love she had for the baby was natural and instinctive and that the love she had for Willie was more intentional. Deliberate love was supposed to be more profound because it committed the soul, even though to Liberty such commitment had the rotting color of eternity tinging its boundlessness. And that was where they were headed, right into those rotting, blue and black colors. She tried to tell the baby that, personally, she felt that the other love, which she had wholly for the baby, was what was going to see them through, but the baby wouldn’t listen. What the baby understood was that it had climbed into the wrong spaceship.
Willie came back at noon, hazed with tar and grime. In a bakery sack, he had more pills. “Interaction,” he said. “Our hearts will burst upon command.” She reached in and making spittle with her tongue, she swallowed one. “Not yet,” Willie said. “We’ll lie down together in the shade. I have champagne.”
“We need ice,” she said, “and cups.”
He laughed and kissed her on the mouth and laughed again. His lips were hot and dry. She walked past the swimming pool, which lay still, grasshopper green on the lawn, and toward a patch of shifting shade cast by fig and pepper trees. She was wearing a skirt she had last worn to a dance and a yellow blouse. She folded her hands on her stomach. It was so still she could hear a phone ringing, the choked rattle of its call, and somewhere, a door slamming shut. Willie brought ice in a silver bowl, a bowl Doris used to float flowers in, two dark and sweating bottles of champagne and glasses from a set that Calvin had received with fill-ups from the gas station.
“I brought your favorite glass,” he said.
“The Invisible Girl,” she said. “Sister to the Human Torch and wife of Mr. Fantastic.” I had a favorite glass, she thought, and here it is. The Invisible Girl could be seen. She wore a silver jumpsuit and her lip was curled.
They drank champagne. He scattered the pills in the lap of her skirt where they gleamed like candies. There were so many there—she put one in her mouth and it had a greasy, purpling taste. Another had a flavor of metal, as though she’d pressed her tongue against a chain. She thought of the coat that had many pockets, but it was an imaginary coat.
“You’re a natural thief,” she said.
“We’re both thieves,” Willie said, “stealing God’s day.”
Soon all the pills were gone. She saw him swallowing and she swallowed, but there was nothing left. Her head was pounding. She said, “Sssshh, I’m trying to remember everything.” Snow, she thought, I want to remember snow. But she had never seen snow. Beaches, she thought. Water falling upon water. She thought of the little glittering pool in the garden, then thought of a well, filled with the bones of luckless creatures. But beneath everything, deep down, the freshness, she felt it, the freshness, the sweetness there. She stretched out in the shade. Willie held her, but she didn’t want him to for the first time. The Invisible Girl, she thought, wife to Mr. Fantastic. They were dying, she thought. She smiled and said to Willie, “I know better than this.” Her eyes were burning and through them she saw the raked driveway winding to the blacktop road. It was just the road that wound past other houses into town, but it seemed strange. The trees seemed taller alongside the ditches, their green and gold leaves trembling from the heat of her burning eyes. She started to walk down the road but there was a dog guarding it.
She was all alone, and she stopped.
Mercury found them. She had come back to talk to Liberty about her Chester, for she liked to talk to Liberty, she liked the way Liberty listened. She saw them there, sleeping hard, leaves lying on their faces. Mercury giggled and touched Willie’s hair, the long, soft hair of a white boy. But when she turned to Liberty, she saw green foam around her mouth like you’d see on a horse, and when she touched her she felt cold. She managed to slap and shake Willie awake. He vomited with his eyes open, becoming unarresting forever more in Mercury’s mind.
The sheriff’s men were called and Liberty would think later that she could remember them, the colors of green and gold weaving in the heat, the leaves’ sick colors blending into the deputies’ shirts. And she thought later she could remember them asking her questions. People always asked the dying questions, Liberty thought,
and the dying probably lied and didn’t even know it. Having the same words available as they’d had all their lives and no new ones probably made lying pretty much inevitable. The click of the heat had become their questions, which had then become a clatter, like utensils being stirred about, being rattled in a pan. Her throat was opened, like a window, she thought, being flung open wide, although they said she could not remember such a thing. But she did remember. She was alone with them in a white room, the men in green and gold, and the days passed. Once, she heard one musing …
I surely wish I could catch that boy that keeps robbing them banks. That boy just seems to float through them drive-in windows, waves a paper bag he’s got wrapped around his hand and the ladies just start heaving the money out. Four banks in a week and a half. That boy could steal the stink off shit and not smell.
The other said Shut your mouth, Hicks. There’s a sick girl in here.
Hicks said She’s in a coma. She won’t take no offense.
She was brought back, then almost lost to septicemia, but her poisoned blood was taken from her drop by drop and she was brought back again. Mistakes were made, but in the end, infection simplified her. It unadorned her. There would be no more babies for Liberty. Liberty’s babies all went to live in that world where mistakes aren’t made.
There was one floor on a wing of the hospital where certain people went for a while and Liberty went there. It was called Five North. Willie was not allowed to visit her, but he sent her things. No one else came. Willie sent her perfume once and once he sent her a game where there were numbered black and white plastic pieces sliding in a frame. There was one empty space. Each piece had a number, but the numbers were all mixed up. The person who was playing the game was supposed to use that empty space to make order.
On Five North there was a lady who came once a day to talk to Liberty. Her name was Miss Tweedie. Miss Tweedie enjoyed working with people on this wing because they were so polite. Being back in the world seemed to hypnotize them.
You look upon your nondeath as a threatening danger to you, Miss Tweedie said. She had bitten nails, which must have been a drawback professionally, but she had a birthmark on her jaw that could be interpreted by the ill at their leisure. Liberty almost expected her to point to it and say What does this represent to you?, but she never did. Liberty did not look at Miss Tweedie’s face much. Instead, she watched the gnawed, scrubbed nails lying in the woman’s lap, sometimes on the coverlet, sometimes daubing in the air. Love can sometimes be a curse, Miss Tweedie said, even a sickness.
There was a common room on Five North where people could gather for coffee in the morning. On Sundays, there were cookies with the coffee and a Bible was placed out. On the day Liberty was going to be released, a woman in the common room screamed out His children are far from safety and they are crushed in the gate! She poured scalding coffee over her arms with joy. A man shouted Amen, Amen, we’re Job’s children we’re all of us Job’s children! The people stirred and flung themselves back and forth like fish in the waters of a shrinking pond. Some shouted and wept. Liberty pressed herself against the wall and played the plastic game, hearing the others but not watching them. Her fingers quickly moved the plastic pieces back and forth, up and down. Her fingers flew across the moving pieces. The woman who had burnt herself with such happiness was led away, and the room grew calm again, and stilled. There was no outside to the room, that is, the outside could not be seen. The room was wallpapered to appear like a long, wide view of trees—a young forest of slender trees with the glint of a river winding deep within the dimensions of it. It was a glade, Liberty thought, or a copse. She could look at it for a long time. The colors were green and gold like the deputies’ uniforms. She thought she could remember the deputy who was a philosopher, or was that the other one? The one who was writing something down, his big hand cupped as though he were writing on the palm. She is a felon, he was writing, who attempted to break into the house of death …
Once a day, Miss Tweedie came to see Liberty. Miss Melanie Tweedie had been employed to help her. You almost died, dear, and at times you feel you did die. That’s a very common feeling, it’s been well documented. In times of war when a man survives and the buddy right next to him does not. That’s where most of our documentation comes from. Or from multiple car crashes or tornadoes. The word buddy sounded strange on Miss Tweedie’s lips. But in your case, dear, no one died. That little thing, bless it, wasn’t anything you must think died.
Liberty sat on a bed in a seersucker bathrobe and stared at the nubs of the cloth. She counted the nubs on one sleeve and then the other. The numbers never came out the same. The nubs of the seersucker gave the appearance of something missing. You are preceiving your life, which you really look upon as your nondeath, as a spectator Miss Tweedie said. Oh, it’s possible to know so much today.
There was, of course, a doctor. He told Liberty that there was a chemical substance similar to morphine produced naturally in the brain when death was near, when the other systems began to fail. Everything, the doctor said, can be explained eventually. The doctor’s son had won a jingle contest sponsored by a cereal company and the whole family was going to Hollywood for a week. Doctors can’t afford to take things too seriously, the doctor said. Miss Tweedie was short and the doctor tall. They came to her each day like the hands of a clock.
Then on that day Liberty was to be released, it was Willie who came to her. Miss Tweedie helped her pack her things in a brown paper grocery bag. The bag had a hurricane-tracking map on it, for it was the season. The sky was gray with big hot rain clouds massing. It was the fall now. Willie had been outside and she had been inside all this time and no one thought it was unusual.
She stood outside the hospital with him, looking backward at the windows of Five North. There were holes for windows there, but there was no glass. There were louvers, and behind the louvers, concrete block.
“Where have you been?” she asked him.
“I haven’t been home,” Willie said. “They won’t let us live there anymore. I’ve been living in Blossum in a trailer.”
“Are we going there?” she asked. She shaded her eyes with her hand against the stolid light. She felt that she had a job to do, that she had just been hired for this job. She had to live out each day, one after another, until her days were gone.
He shook his head. “We’ll go outside town.” He wore jeans, a jacket without a shirt and a beautiful and incongruous pair of wing tips from a thrift shop. She knew they were a dead man’s shoes.
“I still trust you,” Liberty said.
“We missed, didn’t we.”
“Part of us didn’t,” she said.
“My father gave us money. It will last us a while.”
Liberty remembered Beg-A-Loan. She remembered a drawer in Doris’s kitchen filled with clean dishtowels, the smell of her embrace like fresh biscuits. Everything had been in order there, loving and illusionary. “Are your mother and father all right?” She tugged at her hair, a habit she had picked up in Five North. Broken strands of it fell through her fingers.
“No,” Willie said, “they’re not all right.”
“They’ve shut the door, have they?” she said, pulling her hair.
“Old-fashioned banishment,” he said. “The result of too much Bible study.”
“My parents don’t even know anything about this, I guess.”
“I don’t think so,” Willie said. He took an envelope out of his pants pocket. “We have to get a car. I know where we’re going to live.”
“All right.”
A school bus went by with younger children on it.
There was money in the envelope and a tape. “They sent us this too,” Willie said. “I haven’t listened to it.”
“I can imagine,” Liberty said.
“Hurt and sadness,” Willie said. “Fear and panic. Regret.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“We could go over to Tape Ape and listen to it.”
>
Across the street from the hospital was a record store called Tape Ape. Beside it was a florist, then a bakery, then a bar. Liberty and Willie had often gone into the record store after school and played records in the cubicles there. She had forgotten about it. They had gone there all the time. A lot of the kids from school did. She tried to remember if she had any friends at school, if she had ever done anything with these friends, like listen to a record in a booth at Tape Ape, wondering whether to buy it or not. She thought she probably hadn’t. She had gone there with Willie. She held the bag with her things in it against her stomach. She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that she had been hired for the job of accomplishing this day and the day after. The thought picked away across her mind like a buzzard on a highway, its ragged wings raised, its frightful head daintily moving. Across the street in the bakery, cardboard cakes filled the window in tiers. There were birthday cakes and wedding cakes, samples of what could be done.
Liberty looped the tape out with her fingers, then bit it in two. She wound the tape round and round her finger and dropped the plastic casing into the street.
“We don’t want this song,” she said. “We don’t want this to be our sad song.” But she knew that it was, that even unheard it would be their song.
Willie watched her somberly. He was large and young and almost grown, and in his youngness he seemed larger than a man. He frowned a little, full of what seemed manly reserve and self-control. Or perhaps he simply felt nothing. The girl with him had a fallow look. She appeared a little irresponsible, her hair was wild, her face drawn, although she did not look close to tears. Her heart, big as a baby’s head, beat on. It was going to beat on.
They stood, two suicides, blinking at one another in the day’s ashy light.