Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  A gentle gong sounded four times: closing hour. So I rode the elevator back down to the lobby and went out into the snowdrifts in the ice-blued streets of Old Toronto, whose picket-fences were almost lost in winter; and the only ominous factor was the red maple-leaf flag at half-mast for me above Grosvenor Street. I felt hungry, but I gathered sunlight’s warm patches between shadow and wind.

  A little girl’s hair blew straight back behind her as she rushed toward the parade, holding her father’s hand. A woman’s hair streamed behind her and her cheeks turned red and white with cold, just before the man she loved kissed her. A girl in a knit wool cap shivered and smiled. Among the parents and children holding hands on subways, bundled babies, couples holding hands nakedly in the cold, I searched for the Canadian girl for whom I had been meant, and the later it got the younger I became, until beneath the yellow-banded sky of late afternoon I found her, on a bicycle, her books in the basket behind her; and because she was meant for me, one of her books fell into the snow. I ran to pick it up. Smilingly, she asked me to walk her home. I was now so young that I had become too small for my wrinkled skin.

  I accompanied her through tall narrow slices of shadow, sky on cloud between them, while she confessed that she had always been lonely. (A girl in a hooded white parka with rabbit fringes was shivering; I knew that I could make her warm, but I had to be faithful to the other one forever. Inspired by me, a man ducked down his head against the wind and hurried to the parade.) And now we had arrived at a bank of brick-celled house-flesh with tall windows bulging out, the roofs steep and peeling very sharply against the cold sky; they’d been maimed by a million frosts. I understood that even here life must sometimes be as dull as a sidewalk between office towers when the winter sun goes behind a cloud, but my face burned for that one girl in the lovely chill of Canada. I had become fourteen years old.

  My girl went up the steps to a creamy door beneath a lavender snow-roof against a certain tall narrow yellow housefront. She went in, and it was too late for me to follow her, too late!

  Grey hairs rushed out of my pores until I seemed to be covered in sealskins. I sought other RETAIL OPPORTUNITIES, but all the women screamed.

  In Canada my friend North, who had once been nervous to the point of making others sad and angry, was now at last happy, with a paunch; his wife was lovely; they had daughters and a nice old house; they fussed happily in the kitchen, cooking scallops from Novia Scotia, talking about the old characters on Digby Neck. I too could have been a Canadian. I could have married the right person. I could have been younger. But it was too late.

  WHEN WE WERE SEVENTEEN

  I pray you, my friend, look into thyself, and endeavor to find out in what part of thy composition is the prima materia of the lapis philosophorum, or out of what part of thy substance can the first matter of our stone be drawn. Thou sayest, it must either be in the hair, sweat, or excrement. I say in none of these thou shalt ever be able to find it, and yet thou shalt find it in thyself.

  Francis Barrett, 1801

  1

  Less than a mile within the posted limits of our city, at the intersection where Mr. Murmuracki’s establishment used to be, a left turn parallel to the cemetery will bring you past the old gas station to frost on the weed-islands between which white-beaked dark birds dip down at dawn, and sunrise arrives half-seen above a wind-riddled thunderhead, hurling down slantwise rays through every wound. Mist-fingers grope up out of steely pools. Suddenly color returns to the world, silvers going red, lovely russets and greens introducing themselves, the long rays of light now floating on the cress. Across the levee, a file of ducks swims in the ditch of ice-colored water which once morning reaches it will return to algae-green. Back at West Laurel Hill, whose original wall commences two and a half miles from here, sun-rectangles and polyhedral shadows decorate the frosted grass between the plinths, and the headstones remain partially silhouetted against the rising sun. An approximation of their projections could be made with the most elementary mechanical drafting instruments; while here at the marsh the shadow-patterns remain too grand to be understood, supernatural powers being in fact so feeble that darkness owns greater power around rivers than around graves. Now warmth touches the railroad embankment, unfurling downward, releasing the mud’s smoky smell, until all the things of this world—those galls on that oak tree, the dead reeds, the hank of down from last year’s cattails, the clot of spiderweb, that snorting otter rolling in a sunny patch of grass, the meadow’s stripes of silver and russet—appear fixed in their true natures, as if a flashlight-beam would prove them to retain their present forms no matter how powerful tonight’s darkness.

  A neighbor of mine once whiled away a summer here. I will not write his name.

  2

  His greyhaired ladyfriends still flattered him that his hair was not grey, merely greying a trifle at the temples. He avoided mirrors; and the neighbors with whom he was growing old treated him as if he were as young as they, so he returned the favor even though he knew that unlike them he truly was—or at least younger than he looked. One morning his stomach felt a trifle upset, but the next day found him as healthy as ever; and yet he seemed to be losing his appetite; he used to love bacon and eggs, and now the smell made him sick. The nausea descended like snow, almost imperceptibly coating the inside of his throat, piling up flake by flake in his chest and drifting down into his belly. For years he had been overweight, so this was actually fortuitous. He abstained from fatty foods more easily than ever before; and if his face began to draw in, well, didn’t that mean he’d soon be lighter on his feet? The doctor gave him four months.

  The instant he was alone again, he sat down at his desk.

  His best friend Luke had been a practical soul who took pleasure in errands checked off, a bare desk and taxes paid early. He gave away most of what he owned, dispatching each thing to whoever he supposed would use it best. They scattered his ashes in the mountains.

  Before Luke, and partially coterminously with him, there had once also been a certain tall, skinny friend called Isaac, whom he never would have known were it not for Clara, who had loved Isaac in high school and still alluded sadly to the summer when Isaac went away, which is to say from everyone, and of course from Clara in particular. She must have just turned nineteen, which would have made Isaac twenty-one, so this neighbor of mine who now had four months left had been twenty-two and already engaged to Clara when she asked him to meet Isaac. At that time he dreaded new people, not to mention any boy for whom Clara evidently still cared, but he obliged her, as a peculiar result of which he and Isaac became close. Nearly forty years ago now (it must have been the spring after Clara threw him out), he met Luke, and presently introduced him to Isaac, who among other virtues declined to possess more than he could carry on his back. Luke guardedly admired this. Wherever he went, Isaac journeyed deep, and kept on going. He was hardy, abstemious, longlegged, cheerful if fidgety, generous if spendthrift, capable of opening his heart and therefore of exciting affection in others, particularly women; and, above all, light in his travels. His bugbears were dishonesty and uncleanliness. Narcissists readily fail to notice that honesty can be unkind, while filthiness derives no more frequently from culpability or innate foulness than from helplessness or brokenness. Isaac’s stellar fidelity to himself rendered him accordingly liable to fits of capricious extremism. Hence the summer when he went away, Clara’s seventeenth. Luke used to observe that whatever meanness someone committed elsewhere would eventually repeat itself at close hand, and in due course Isaac went away again, into the desert, where he decided to live out his life. Luke, who kept up a love of hiking literally to the end, was impressed, indeed, almost haunted by his example, and used to praise him, but that methodical breaking of contact with his old friends partook of cruelty, at least from the standpoint of my neighbor with the upset stomach, who had never respected the decisions of Buddha and Jesus, let alone (for instance) Clara, to abandon those who l
oved them. Isaac did not mind breaking women’s hearts; he felt what he felt, so why live a lie? When he went away from my neighbor, a woman told him to do it—for in between leaving women, Isaac made them his empresses. Perhaps what Luke admired the most about him was that he seemed never to regret himself. So Isaac went away, and my neighbor heard nothing of him for years. Presently, by some accident (Isaac needed help in obtaining antibiotics), they became friends again. But once my neighbor began to get fat, Isaac grew contemptuous. For his part, the fat one imagined that he had done a lot for Isaac, materially and otherwise; loyalty was his particular fetish, which must have been why he remained faithful to all his many girlfriends. One night after a certain favorite had jilted him, he sought to express his grief to Isaac, who knew her moderately. It was sad, no doubt; the fat man felt quite weak just then; he nearly wept while relating his pain to Isaac—who promptly went away from him for good. Somewhere on the other side is a gentler valley of milky-green rivers whose broad rapids enclose many-ledged islands upon each of which a skeleton may sun itself, but whether or not Isaac got there I cannot say. Were one to know a spiderweb only by glimpsing it edge-on, that would still be understanding of a sort; therefore, he and Isaac comprehended one another. To Isaac’s way of thinking, he must have been as flabby and unclean as he looked; while to the fat one, this second betrayal was unforgivable, not that forgiveness was relevant. In point of fact, the fat one was goodhearted enough, like most people of his temperament; and had Isaac ever called upon him he would have been as agreeable as he supposed he had been to Clara (who, I must admit, had gone away not thinking highly of him). Who are we, then, the inhabitors of our courteous actions, or the happy perpetrators of our malignant fantasies?

  Over the years the recollection of Isaac became apparently indifferent to him; he did not mind when Luke invoked him; and when Luke commenced giving away his possessions, it even comforted him to imagine his friend as entering into the situation of Isaac, who, having already disencumbered himself of his one piece of furniture, a mattress, slept for a final handful of nights on the carpet of his rented room, and was now, in the space of a quarter-hour, loading everything he owned into his backpack, preparatory to striding forever into the wind of the white canyon. If such could have been in even the most metaphorical sense Luke’s destination, then his passing out of sight (let’s say into the relative brightness of the lunar highlands) escaped being terrible. Of course my fat neighbor knew it to be terrible and worse; all the same, when his own turn came, he found himself preparing to unlock his desk, so as to make disposition of what was most precious of all his treasures—namely, the letters from all the women he’d loved.

  3

  In fact, two desks belonged to him. One was an antique rolltop formerly his father’s. Prior to becoming old he’d wondered what to do with it. Never practical, he employed its pigeonholes for the adapters and plugs of lost electric-powered devices, which might yet reveal themselves (for in those days it was patent that he would live forever); not to mention the fat old analog microphone, the flash cards he had once made in order to dither with the Inuktitut language, broken pencil leads, pens which might or might not be out of ink, boxes of color slides whose subjects he had forgotten (but worth saving in case some of them might be naked pictures), spectacles which no longer befitted his eyes, keys to forgotten chests, padlocks, apartments and houses, and an empty pill bottle which remained eligible for one refill fourteen years ago. Luke gave him those pills when he developed a certain intimate complaint.

  It makes me happy to think of you having this desk, his father had said. The son already owned the other desk. He liked his father’s desk and vaguely hoped to someday work at it in a worthy manner. His father had been as uncluttered as Luke. Seeing what became of his desk, his father said nothing.

  When he sat down to cross his arms on its bed of darkgrained red-stained maple, he knew that his father must have rested his elbows here in some analogous configuration, wide-eyed in his spectacles, sipping tea, steadily and probably contentedly preparing business drafts. His father had always been a light sleeper, and in early middle age sometimes worked through the night. Once the boy himself had insomnia, and came barefoot and quiet into the study at dawn, peeping at his father, whom he loved very much but of whom he was somewhat afraid. His father did not send him away. They sat together, his father working prodigiously over these papers which the child could not understand: the boy in the leather armchair, his bare feet cold, his father at this desk. It was one of the few objects he could imagine which appeared both precious and dependable. Even now he could barely grasp both of its curving wings when he outstretched his arms. Of course his father had been a bigger man in every way; once his mother had them stand back to back to be measured, and his father was a quarter-inch taller.— I want you to have this, his father said when his parents moved away. But while his father lived, the desk was not so much used as imposed upon. This box of rope, scissors and string, what would happen to it now? He opened the drawer which contained a wooden gouge, perhaps his father’s, a box of Luke’s travel slides, the hair ornament pertaining to a bygone girlfriend (the scent of her cheap pomade, somewhat simplified by the decades, nonetheless resisted them), a square of the red cloth in which his signal pistol used to be wrapped, and the red pinwheel which his daughter had awarded him when she was in elementary school (nowadays her children preoccupied her so happily that he preferred not to inform her of his condition); and then he closed that drawer again, gnawing on a pain pill. The next drawer down was so full of unlabeled color negatives that it barely closed. He pulled it out an inch, just to remind himself that someday—as if there were still a someday!—he would sort all those images, and even utilize them. Shutting that one as best he could, he drew out the drawer containing an obsolete “Guide for Expeditions to the Canadian Arctic Islands,” a galvanized nail, a bottle of expired sulfa powder for frostbite, a photograph of a very young and handsome Luke (he ought to mail it to the widow, who continued unremarried), a pamphlet which discussed the breathing holes of ringed seals and the overwintering strategies of bearded seals, and a moon map, copyrighted thirty-five years ago. Half-smiling, he browsed for a moment over the craters of that bluish-grey disk. When he was a schoolboy, the teachers used to promise atomic-powered lunar travel “in our lifetime.” He had always wished to visit the moon.

  4

  But it was not in his father’s desk but in his own that he had to search. The stout square legs of this ugly if likewise capacious item, whose smooth top was wood-patterned laminate, doubled as filing cabinets. The left side being unlockable, he used that for his contracts and other such items which he never would miss if someone stole them. His father would have guarded them better. The righthand cabinet was for old love letters; those he had locked up years ago. Where was the key? Over the years he had dropped all keys extraneous, unknown or momentarily unnecessary into a ceramic dish on his father’s desk. As it was, he still carried too many around—the price of owning properties, leasing mailboxes and hiding secrets.

  And so in advance of dawn he was on his knees before the desk, wearily trying this key and that in the spiderwebbed lock on the inner side of the righthand leg. He seemed to remember a brass, short-necked entity with a trapezoidal head. But no object of any comparable description served. Could the lock require oiling? He would spray it as soon as he felt less ill—any day, no doubt. First he’d better open it. An impatient craving overtook him for this forgotten miniature country, whose people and landscapes he once knew so well. In his healthier years, boredom had impelled neglect; and so he had commenced the effort half expecting to be stupefied by futility and disgust the instant he gained admittance; but with every failure his longing waxed.— That’s life, thought the dying man.— In his haste he made the mistake of trying only the most likely keys in each ring. Then he started all over again, more systematically. One brass key whose head happened to be ovoid penetrated to the hilt, but declined to tu
rn. A loose silver key leaped from his fingers and disappeared into the dusty darkness. He reached for it, but his stomach checked him at once. Rising, he swallowed two codeine pills. It was sunrise. He lay down, his eyes slowly half-closing.

  When he found the key three days later, he had given up looking for it. Most certainly he had tried every key in the ceramic dish. This one, the ugly-headed object, lay beside the dish as if it had always been there. He turned the lock and opened the drawer. So many women! Luke had met several of them.— Bella struck me as brilliant from the beginning, he said. But she never did her homework. I wonder if she’s lost her mind?— Then for a moment the two friends would remember Bella together, and because Bella had been so long ago there was no pain, only the moderate pleasure which scientific colleagues might share when they identified another previously uncatalogued virus.— Beatrice was my favorite, Luke would say. I felt like she and I had a lot in common. What a goddamned nightmare she was. Have you heard from her?— And he would feel happy that Luke was remembering him by remembering his girlfriends.

  He scooped up letters and let them fall. Now he was getting tired. At the very bottom (for she had been his first) lay the sack of letters from Victoria, in the fat envelope and the thin one.

  He smiled; his heart beat fast. It was she whom he now most longed to know.

  5

  Had he first met her in later life he might have found her ordinary, although she probably wasn’t, this slightly plump blue-eyed blonde who had once been most provisionally his; and if he could have come across her now as she was then, he would simply have turned away from seventeen-year-old jailbait. But since he had known her then as he was then, he was free to claim her.