“But did that really happen?” asked Blanche, worried.
“Now it did,” I said. The past could change, just like the present. The Time Camera proved that.
Mama entered into these games, even a bit too enthusiastically, volunteering for parts we hadn’t written: the beautiful, conniving patroness of the arts, say, who had sponsored the Maltese Ladies’ rise to fame, and hosted their performances at her soirees. She missed the stage. “I do find life in the desert a little lacking in pageantry,” she would sigh, adjusting the hang of our scabbard or attacking our hair with a flurry of little touches.
Our first customers for the Time Camera were our neighbors, Dr. and Mrs. Goat. They lived closer to Grady than we did, as the crow flies, but even farther off the main road, sustained by a small water tower and a generator, in a trailer with a metal shed appended to it. In the afternoon, from the top of the rock we called ours, the roof of their shed was a chip of fire. Mama had driven out to their house on purpose to invite them, though it was ten miles out a dirt road from the highway. (We could have walked there faster.) Dr. Goat looked grumpy but donned a uniform that was part Napoleon, part General Grant. His head was dark and swollen above the tight collar, his eyes all pupil, like ticks buried in flesh. Mrs. Goat closed the wings of a giant bonnet around her head and looked down when the shutter clicked; only a nub of nose showed. There! They were in the past.
The dog was frightened of these apparitions and growled at Dr. Goat, who balanced on one boot and aimed a kick at her. Fritzi yelped. Max threw herself on Dr. Goat and had to be dragged out of a clinch, her face frighteningly red. Our first customers, therefore, departed in a hurry, leaving their photos behind. Those hung in the office for years; they are probably still there.
Their name was not actually Goat, I remember. We called them Goat because…Quite suddenly I do not feel like writing any more today.
ON MURDER
There is nothing so bracing as planning a murder. I recommend it to the weak-willed and those with a leaky sense of self. It is fortifying as a drop of coagulant in a solution.
I had planned (The word is too strong. Imagined. Anticipated?) this particular murder for so many years that it had taken on an air of permanence and respectability. To understand how a murder can be domesticated and even humdrum may be hard for fans of the pounce of the sound track, the streak of scarlet, the gunky skeleton jiggling in the flashlight beam. But I am convinced that if murder is horrible, it’s for its overflow into the ordinary: severed hands in Ziploc bags, the dead baby in the Dumpster behind Chubby’s. Anyone who has eaten a pork chop has all the information she needs for murder, and even vegetarians have honed their skills on a spaghetti squash or two. It takes a special kind of person, a criminal, to commit a crime? You know better; in your dreams you’ve already tried it. Ask Heloise how neatly you bagged the body and dragged it (closed in the folding cot with the shoddy, squeaky wheels) all the way to the sandbox in the park, despite the comedy of errors: the arm flopping out and dragging on the sidewalk, the curious golden retriever, the cell phone sounding a warning.
In case I found I lacked resolve when the moment came, I decided to practice. I set my sights small. You can get ants anywhere, and slaughter hordes of them without anyone raising a hue and cry. I cut their heads off with a knife, a credit card, an emory board. As it became easier, I deliberately extended my sympathies to my victims, so as to toughen myself further. I bent a benevolent eye on the shiny, busy little chap, and cheered him on. “Why, here’s Mr. Ant. What a dapper fellow. Oops-a-daisy, here comes the knife!” There was a tiny crunch when their necks were severed.
I dropped their bodies like hints behind me, a series of little specks, like ellipses, or the footprints of someone heading out alone onto the salt flats at noon, a foolhardy and possibly irreversible action.
I spoke of plastic baggies and a nighttime trip to the Dumpster. It was only to make a point. There will be none of that here. Blood in the surgery is quite different from that stuff seeping from under the woodpile. A masked surgeon cannot be compared to a masked gunman, though nobody likes going to the doctor. This would be like purging a tapeworm, or lancing a boil, and I felt great! As a murderer I was everything society approves of: efficient, affable, even-tempered, reasonable. I held my horses. I kept my head. I even called home.
Papa picked up the phone. He did not even sound surprised.
“England! Well, that’s great. You certainly are elevating the Olneys in the culture department. While you’re there, see if you can find out anything about the dollhouse. I’ve always wanted to know its history. Granny thought it was at least a hundred years old and either English or Dutch. With your skills you should be able to get us some top-drawer information!” (My parents thought I was getting my doctorate in history at UC Berkeley, and attributed my unusual working hours to a life spent in libraries. I told them I was writing my dissertation on understudies, apprentices, seconds in command, and those who published their theories a week too late. A private joke.)
Mama was away at a joint conference between the Siamists and the Togetherists, but Papa connected me to Max in the gift shop. Max was running for mayor of Grady, on the platform of revitalizing Grady’s economy by turning it into a ghost town like Too Bad. “That’s a really weird idea, Max,” I said.
“No, listen, Nora, I think you’ll agree that it’s the answer. Grady’s days are numbered. The mines have had another round of layoffs, and the Penitence Ground will hold its last test this year. People might not want to hear it, but Grady is already a ghost town in the making. It’s only a matter of time. Now what I’m thinking is, preemptive strike. Grady’s future is in its past. If we, I say we as an adoptive citizen of Grady, if we bill ourselves as a ghost town before it happens, and start bringing in revenue from tourism, we’ll save ourselves from turning into a real ghost town.”
After I hung up, I sat for a long time with my hand on the phone. Then I rang up a travel agent with a voice like a budgerigar who said “absolutely” for yes and had a word for every letter (“that was N as in nobody O as in omission R as in riddle A as in agony?”), and booked my flight.
I left a week later. I took both passports, the Siamese Twin Reference Manual, a number of scarves, and some matches, just in case.
Before I went through security, I found a restroom and latched myself into a stall. I sat down on the seat to unzip my carry-on and groped past the extra sweater I had stuck in at the last minute to the cool round of the jar. The automated toilet woke sobbing from a dream. I unscrewed the jar lid, drove my fingers into the tender pears, and pulled out the license and the rolled passport. I decanted what remained of the pears into the toilet—how strange and lovely they looked, like the rarefied stool of some daughter of Midas!—and forced the jar down into the sanitary napkin hutch. The toilet sobbed again, accepting the offering. Then I licked the syrup off my new license and passport and folded them into my notebook. Trey would be crestfallen. But this was not the Great Pear Caper, this was a human life.
I had booked a singleton seat to save questions on the return trip, rather than one of the special seats with wider backs and double pillows that under pressure from twofer lobbyists the airlines had begun to install in their newer planes, and the gentleman to our right was not pleased. There seemed to be a surplus of elbows between us, most of them his. I ceded the armrest to his fat, furry elbow, wedged the single miniature pillow they gave me between my head and Blanche’s, so we would not knock together like castanets in the event of turbulence, and leaned against the vibrating window. Some passengers were already asleep, mouths open, but I wanted to watch the ground go away. Unused to flying, I hadn’t thought of asking for a seat on the left, so Blanche wouldn’t block my view, but I had been given one anyway. Still time to request one for the return, I thought, then remembered, thrilled, that by then I would no longer need it. Beside the runway the green grass rivered back. Faster, faster. Then came a miraculous ungluing, a corrective pulling
away, leaving behind everything, ev—a hot breath purled in my ear.
I resettled Blanche’s head on the pillow. The city tilting, rotating, sliding down the inclined plane of earth. He knows perfectly well that his foot is in my floor space. Waves shrunk to ripples. Ghosts tore across our wings. The ripples that were really waves merged imperceptibly into the fog, and then there was only fog. Then the grey-mauve shadow of the plane was shrinking on the top of the clouds below.
My neighbor turned his broad back to me and stretched his legs out in the aisle until the stewardess arrived with the cart. When she asked if I wanted one bag of nuts or two, he snorted. “Two,” I said, “and I’ll have two drinks as well.” I set them side by side on my tray and downed them one after the other.
Closing my eyes, I began to go over the story I was planning to use if interrogated. It involved an antiquated relative with a moribund business enterprise growing heirloom vegetables for seed to sell mail-order to jaded gardeners. No, I was not a gardener myself. I understood some of the varieties were coveted by people who cared about that sort of thing, exquisite cherry tomatoes that snap between your teeth, rare as caviar! I was going to help Aunt Timothea, yes, it is an unusual name, I guess her father wanted a boy, not my grandfather but my great-grandfather, she’s a great-aunt really, but as I was saying, I was going to help Aunt Tim set up a system to sell seed over the Internet, well yes she is an up-to-date lady, she got obsessed with Web auctions and ended up buying a pair of cast-iron Scottie dogs that were costing a fortune to ship from Maryland, in fact I’d get there before the Scotties did, then she found the very same Scotties in her local shop, it turned out they were made in Goole, if you turn one over you find the stamp of the foundry, see, officer, a simple circle, and inside, why nothing, nothing but ashes, and these two little horns…
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SADNESS
After the gold and the silver and the copper failed, there was one final wave of prospectors. This time it was a real rush, but by then Too Bad was already a ghost town. Granny had saved the centennial edition of the Grady paper. “Many residents will remember the uranium boom in the late 40s. Duplicity County was alive with the talk of big strikes, much money was spent on exploration and equipment, and many modern-day prospectors were in the field. Grady was the hub: General Services Administration set up a depot at Agua Sucio and stockpiled the uranium. Much of the prospecting occurred in the Duplicity mountains south of Too Bad, where the quartzite was exposed.”
“I had just gotten away from this godforsaken place,” Granny said. “Moved to Minneapolis, got a job in a diner, the Twin Cities diner. I met your grandfather there, and he dragged me right back here with him. He was going to strike it big in uranium. He spent a caboodle on Geiger counters, scintillometers, black lamps, all that nonsense. Your father ought to know better. But I guess it’s in the blood.”
Papa was a geologist and a surveyor and a mapmaker. He had secured a mandate from the government to survey and map the surrounding area with an eye to secret deposits of strategic minerals. “Uranium fever,” said Granny, “that’s what you’ve got, same as your daddy.”
He kept a Geiger counter in the shed. Sometimes, sun-blind, feeling for the pliers with light, sensitive touches over unstable assemblages of cool metal edges and rubber-clad curves, we would hear it utter a lone, comforting click. If Papa was there with us, it clicked more often, and he’d tsk and turn it off. In the shed, also, were boxes of dentist’s X-ray film, stiff white tabs with rounded corners. He always carried some with him. They made a sagging shape in his breast pocket. Sometimes when we walked together, he would turn aside and press a tab between two rocks, leave them balanced there. Later he would collect the tabs and examine them for traces, figures, ghosts. In the most far-flung places we found his little goblins, and sometimes, wickedly, we would prise the tabs open and pore over the glossy film, looking for ghosts of our own. We had an alibi in the pack rats, who would snitch the tabs to decorate their nests. Papa scanned every pack rat nest with narrowed eyes, and he would step even into the prickly maze of a downed cholla to pluck one of his tokens out of the heap of sticks, prickly pear pads, candy wrappers, bullets. Not that it was any use to him, so far from where he left it. At home, after bitterly scanning the film for traces, he’d say, “That could have been a strike. Earl Tracy sold his claim for half a million dollars to Union Carbide, and I’m decorating a rat’s house.” Then he would pointedly throw it away.
Papa had a box of keys he got at the Grady junk shop. Old keys, to forgotten doors, a whole town’s worth. You laid down the X-ray film, put the key on top of that, and on top of the key placed the rock you thought might be radioactive carnotite or uraninite or even pitchblende. If it emitted alpha rays, the shape of the key would be marked on the film. More precisely, the negative space of the key marked the film, leaving a key-shaped shadow on a blanched landscape—ghost keys for ghost doors. We found these totem piles too, like little votives. The desert was covered with keys. Papa was looking for the keyhole, we figured. Someday a long locked door would open and let him in. “Grampa will be there,” I informed Blanche, and we shuddered.
Grampa was killed by American Sadness.
In 1951, recognizing the need for a national activity of penance, a despondent American government had begun bombing itself.
Granny drew two tadpoles, Yin and Yang. They looked like this: 69. “Say the black tadpole is America. Then the white one is un-America. When bombing un-America, America must also bomb the un-America in herself. That’s this white spot here.” She indicated the tadpole’s eye.
“What’s the black spot?”
“There’s always one place America doesn’t bomb,” she said. “It’s the America in what is not America.”
“Where is it?”
She thought. “Maybe Iceland,” she said.
The spot they chose for the National Penitence Ground or Proving Ground or, later, Test Site, was the emptyest part of an emptyish state, Nevada. “Unfortunately,” Granny said, “there is no such thing as empty.” Grampa had been prospecting in the range a little south of Too Bad when a bomb went off. “Nobody had bothered to tell us to stay indoors that day. I do recall someone stopping by and suggesting I take my laundry off the line, and wash my hair.
“Well, the wind was blowing your granddad’s way. His Geiger counter started acting so erratic he thought it was broken. They aren’t made for such high levels of radiation. All the same he started home, because he obviously wasn’t going to get any good
reads out of it. If he hadn’t, I think he might have died right there. As it was, he got burns all over his head. What hair he had left fell out. I remember him calling me in to look at his comb. He’d put it through his hair just once, and it had a snarl the size of a Brillo pad stuck in it. Soon his tongue and throat swelled up to the point they had to put a straw down it for him to breathe. It was a pitiful thing, to hear him trying to cuss through that straw.” Her laugh cut off sharply. “He died complaining. And I took up right where he left off. From that point on, there was no peace between me and the citizens of Grady.”
Many of them worked in the Penitence Ground. They kept right on donning the coveralls and the badges while their teeth fell out. “They’re certainly plucky,” Granny said, shaking her head. The government used a different adjective. In a memo, the locals were described as a “low-use segment of the population.” “Low-use,” said Granny. “What language.”
This adjective spilled out of the sky over Grady. (“Such sunsets we had,” said Granny. “You never saw such colors.”) Subsequently, a number of women gave birth to creatures resembling prairie dogs, lizards, and cats. Others gave birth to things resembling grapes or the fruit of the prickly pear. Some had miscarriages, some stopped having children at all, and seven had “simple” children, their minds misted over with Sadness. One of them, a few years older than we were, had stamped our books at the library: Chris Marchpane. They all sat in the front row in church. The angel row, it was called.
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