by Rick Bass
Maxine hesitates, playing the odds, and with some effort, decides it's better to have his full enthusiasm than to wish for another. "Yes, you can take it down."
And again Jefferson Eads feels new warmth, electricity flowing through new places in his mind, the river current of it a little wider, and a little wilder. This is what life is like, he thinks. It's enough to make you set down your camera. It's not common, but it's fine enough to go hunting for it, and to wait, again and again, for such pleasure's return.
They make it back to her house unscathed. Maxine uses the opportunity of having Jefferson Eads along with her and stops at the gas station to fill her car. A full tank will last another six months. What will my condition be then? she wonders. She hands Jefferson the money and he pumps the gas.
He's so useful to have around! In a way he's far better than Buddy. She feels a warmth in her old heart that is not unlike how it was when she was drinking, but this is better. It's similar, in that it makes her want more, but it's better, in that a little is better than nothing. Which is not how it was with the bottle.
They go back into her treasure chest room and he films her unearthing more memorabilia, explaining to the camera the significance of each ancient artifact. A poster from a show with Elvis, signed by the King. A locket given to her by Johnny Cash. Jefferson Eads burns through another memory card, and at the bottom of the chest, she pulls out a nondescript cassette in a generic plastic case. The small rectangle is hand-lettered in red marker, "John Lennon—The Three Bells," and is dated December 8, 1980.
"His widow sent it to me," Maxine says. "It was the last thing he recorded. He was playing around in the studio, did this, then walked outside and got shot."
Jefferson Eads watches her face as she speaks. He's filming, is holding the camera under one arm as if it's a football, and he watches her face for a clue as to what he should be feeling.
He knows that John Lennon was a big deal, was one of the Beatles, and he senses dimly that this is a very sad event, but that part of his brain just isn't firing, isn't blossoming with the illumination, the gold light of sorrow. Still, he detects something like regret—something he can't quite identify—in Maxine's countenance, and he decides to take a chance.
"That's sad," he says carefully, and for a moment he thinks he's guessed wrong, because Maxine's expression doesn't change, her reverie remains intact.
"Yes," she says finally, "it is," though Jefferson is confused, because it seems to him she might be referring to something or someone else.
They take the tape into the front room and she plays it for him. There's not much to it—the banter, the quick confident warm-up chords, and then suddenly Lennon's into the song, rocking out, singing about Little Jimmy Brown and a valley in France—and then someone walks into the studio and interrupts him.
We were all interrupted, Maxine thinks. She is the only one who has gone the whole distance, and then beyond.
"Do you want me to dig any more holes?" she asks. She's not joking, is resigned to the gauntlet through which she must pass to regain the center of fame, and would rather get the digging out of the way sooner than later, while she still has a few shreds of energy left.
"No," Jefferson Eads says, "but I do want you to do something tonight. I've been thinking about it a lot and I want to film you walking down the street at night with a lantern," he says. "I'll probably film it from a lot of different angles. I want you to wear something white. I'll film you from a long way away," he says.
"Sure," she says, and she feels almost like she did the time she listened to Jim Ed and Bonnie discuss the breakup, and the phone call to Chet: as if she's outside of herself, listening to herself from that same distance. As if his proposal makes perfect sense.
Jefferson Eads is nothing if not a fast learner; he remembers her discomfort with his earlier prescription of hole digging and tries to explain his latest idea with a little more diplomacy. "Don't you ever want something without knowing why?" he asks. "Sometimes—a lot of times—that's how it is for me with a scene. I just have to see it. I feel like I already have seen it and need to capture it."
"I think I might know a little what that's like," Maxine says. And for a second, she really means it; there's something vaguely familiar about what he's describing, something she feels she stands at the edge of now, where once she was closer to its center.
"I have a sheet," she says. "I don't have a lantern."
"I have an old one I got in a garage sale," he says. "I'll go back home and get it and come over later this afternoon." He looks at her with mild concern, if not actually love or affection. "Do you think you should take a nap?" he asks. "It'll probably be a pretty involved shoot."
"Yes," she says, wondering if he's hypnotizing her, for now that he mentions it, she can barely stay awake, feels that she might slide from her chair and lie down right there on the carpet and sleep for hours. "I think so," she says.
Her chin drops. He is rising and saying "I'll let myself out"; she is dreaming before he reaches the door.
When she awakens it is dusk, though at first she confuses it with dawn, and then, recognizing it as evening, thinks that she has slept a day and a night, has lost her movie. She panics, and not knowing what else to do, calls the operator to ask her what day and date it is, but still that doesn't do any good, for she doesn't know what day and date it had been to begin with. She doesn't have Jefferson Eads's phone number, tries to look it up in the phone book, but can find no Eads. She just has to wait. She's slept so long that even Buddy has come and gone.
Maxine has been sitting by the front window with the curtains parted a few inches, waiting and watching, for an hour, when she sees Jefferson Eads coming down the street pulling a red wagon with all his gear in it and some self-consciousness: as if he knows or believes that he is too old for wagons.
There's still half an hour or so before true dark, but he's been placing his paper sacks with the tea candles in each one in two rows, forming a lane along the sidewalk, and as she watches, he stops and places two more, then two more, and again, working his way toward her.
How far will I have to walk? she wonders, and then with even greater worry, Where is he leading me? Her night vision is worse than even her dimming daylight sight—she's functionally blind at night—and her old heart thunders again, though there is no question of not stepping forward toward whatever thin opportunity might present itself.
She squints, watches his slow progress—his precision—and she dares to hope again, just as she did when she sent off the recording of Jim Ed to The Barnyard Frolic.
Never, not for one moment, has she had the thought that at any point along the path, or any coordinate on the timeline, has she taken a wrong turn or made a single wrong choice. There has never been a choice to make: her every gesture has been inflamed by righteousness and non-negotiability, to the point where she wants to scream, to the point where she is terrified, to the point where she realizes she has become the most imprisoned person in the world.
She rises, leaning on her walker, raps on the glass to get his attention, but her rappings are too feeble; he continues with his labors, head down, adjusting each unlit tea light just so, lost in his vision not of how the world should or could be but of how it is, if even only for a short distance around him: the distance, perhaps, of each throw of radiant light once he lights the candles, and each next step.
Why are these people drawn to Maxine? What do they take from her, what do they need from her? Must she carry their weight for them? Why do they need, much less want, her darkness?
Now Jefferson Eads is working his way up her sidewalk, and she feels overwhelmed with the success of being loved or desired; she feels as she did when she was a bride on her wedding day, back when she thought Tommy was one of the answers.
I have never made a single wrong choice, she thinks. It has all led me to where I need to be: here, now.
Jefferson Eads knocks at the door. He has finished; he is ready to begin. She nearly le
aps to her feet and shoves her walker toward the door so quickly that she almost falls down—for a moment she is running behind the walker.
They wait for even fuller darkness, visiting quietly. Then he wraps the sheet around her like a toga or a sari, adjusting it just so.
It's been a long time since she's been touched. Her annual visits to the doctor, when the nurse takes her pulse and blood pressure. The careful, professional ministrations of the physician's assistant as he moves the stethoscope around on her bony chest, as if searching for something he's not even sure is there, or is having trouble finding.
Jefferson Eads wraps and unwraps the sheet with the care of a tailor. He's lost in the work, has no idea of the pleasure, the relief, it's bringing her. Life was amazing once and will be again.
Finally he has it just right, and steps back to be sure. It's dark enough outside now.
"Can you walk without the walker?" he asks.
"Do you need me to?"
He pauses, then says, "One sequence with, and one without." He wants everything. He will weed out almost everything in the editing, but does that make the unused parts waste?
"Start without, then come back and rest, and we'll do it again with the walker." She recognizes his obsession coming on again, the heartlessness of his ambition; he could be talking to a dog, or even an inanimate object. He is looking right at her, but the little tendrils of his connection to her have short-circuited or gone cold.
"If you get too far away and can't make it back, I can put you in the wagon and pull you home that way," he says.
Like a commando or a one-man stage lighting director, he has brought two flashlights, one with green plastic taped over the lens, and the other with red.
"I'll need to shoot from a lot of different angles," he says. "Sometimes I'll be out in the street ahead of you, sometimes behind you. Other times I'll be in the hedges, or in people's yards. Sometimes I'll be right in front of you, or walking right alongside you. When I flash the red light, I'll need you to stop while I relocate, and the green light means go. If I flash the red light several times, it means slow down, and a rapid succession of green blinks means go faster. Okay?"
No, it's not okay, she thinks. I don't understand what you're saying.
"All right," she says.
He's so earnest. Here they are about to set off on a grand adventure, and he's not even smiling. At best he's feeling peace, or settledness. Momentary relief.
Perhaps from that platform of relief joy might come next, but first he must reach that elusive place where he can rest for a moment, and look around.
"I'm going to go light the candles," he says.
She stands at the doorway and watches him light the first pair of luminaria, right at the doorstep, clicking a cigarette lighter, and then the next, and the next: her path, her runway, becoming illuminated before her in that manner, like a fuse being lit, showing her where to go, and again she feels like a young girl—this is how it used to be—and she wishes intensely that Jim Ed and Bonnie were here with her, as well as Floyd and Birdie, Norma, Raymond, Elvis, and all the others who have gone away. If Jim Ed and Bonnie were here, maybe they could even sing, she thinks. She feels like she could. She feels like she wants to.
The lights are distinct, close in, but the farther he goes, the blurrier they become and the more they converge, so that at the outer limits all she can see is one white line curling into the distance, and she is eager to start, does not want to wait for his signal.
What if I cannot see the green light, or the red light? she wonders. What if he is signaling to me right now to begin?
He startles her, coming back up the walk. Of course: she's forgotten about the lantern. It's an old-fashioned liquid fuel Coleman, with ashen mantles; he pumps it up with a piston until it is hissing with pressure, then opens the valve and lights it with a quick pop! and a bowl of light surrounds them.
"Be careful," he says, handing it to her. "Don't burn yourself."
It's heavier than she expected, but she's running on adrenaline. She swings the lantern gamely, like a railroad conductor, and Jefferson Eads smiles. In the night like this, it seems to him somehow that there is not such a gulf between him and the world, and between him and others—here in the night, on a grand cinematic adventure, it feels like he's able maybe to inhabit the full range of steady joy—not yelping, leaping spikes of joy, but a continuous rolling current of it, like that which he imagines most others experience pretty much all the time.
He feels the deep plunge of it, the bracing exhilaration, a feeling something akin to the column of light that precedes an ice cream headache, the icy wedge-shaped dagger of pleasure diving down into the skull just before the spreading arrival of the pain—the light pouring in, the stimulation just before the pain—but then, as it always does, the joy shuts off, as if a cabinet door has been closed to that compartment, or as if a switchplate has been slid closed, and he's back to all business: calm and studious and ordered and controlling.
"Try not to be quite so merry," he instructs her. "If you must swing the lantern at all, do so on a more circumscribed radius. Try to make it seem like you're looking for something," he says. "Like you're lost. Walk slowly. Like you're looking for something you dropped."
"All right," Maxine says. "Like this?"
"Yes," Jefferson Eads says, "that's it." He stares at her and her small surrounding dome of white light like a raptor, a hawk beholding its prey, bewitched by the improbable nearness of success. "Yes," he says, "like that." He flashes the green light and then the red light to make sure they're working. "Go to the end of the candles," he says, "then wait there for me."
He shoulders the camera and dashes off across the lawn to the first location he's already scouted, beneath a young oak tree two houses down. Some distance away, a dog begins barking, and while Jefferson Eads is thrilled with the audio quality—he flashes the green light once, to get Maxine moving—Maxine herself is terrified, and wonders what kind of dog it is, friendly or angry, and if it is unleashed. She wonders if it might attack her as she navigates the row of candles. Wonders if Jefferson Eads would set the camera down to come help her, or keep filming.
She pushes on into the darkness, one pair of candles at a time. She's terrified of falling—the throw of her lanternlight yields an intense view of each next step: she can see the tiny cracks in the sidewalk, can see each paper bag, each little candle, but nothing else—and she peers intently into the darkness where Jefferson has disappeared, watching for his signals. She trusts him as she has rarely if ever trusted anyone, and seeing neither red nor green flash, she imagines that she must be doing fine.
How many candles? Eventually she comes to the end of the lane, and like an old draft horse she stands there, waiting—she wishes she had a chair to sit down in and rest—and when he comes bustling in from out of the darkness she's almost overwhelmed to see him, having started, for some strange reason, to believe he would not be coming.
"That was good," he says, "but can you go a little quicker?"
"Yes," she says. She turns and starts toward home, the lantern banging crookedly once against her leg.
"Be careful," Jefferson Eads says, "don't catch the sheet on fire."
She can see her house ahead of her. It seems a mile away. She misses everyone she has ever known, wishes she had her life to live over again. She feels the need to at least counsel Jefferson Eads something to this effect—to caution about wrong paths, sloth, squander, and numbness, the heartlessness of ambition—but she doesn't know quite how to say it.
The house, her refuge, her last stand, draws nearer. Her legs are jelly; she doesn't know if she can make it. He's still behind her, whispering, "Good job, keep on." More dogs are barking, and a lone toad hops across the sidewalk, stops in front of her, drawn by the hope of the moths that are beginning to flit against the lantern now; and so slow is Maxine's progress that it seems the toad might hop alongside her all the rest of the way, keeping pace and feeding from time to time on w
hatever residue might be gleaned from the perimeter of her passage. The toad is like something from a fairy tale, she thinks. Was hers a real life masquerading as a fairy tale, or was it the other way around?
When she reaches her house, she calls out to Jefferson Eads to give her a hand up the steps, but he hesitates, then urges her on, tells her she can do it by herself, and that she must. She stops at the bottom step, quivering, too tired even to turn around, and starts to ask again, but knows what the answer will be. Knows that his obsession exceeds her own.
She sets the lantern down carefully, and with that last little bit of relief—her burden momentarily lessened—takes the first step, gripping the wrought-iron handrail, and then the next, and finally, the third. She leans against the door, then goes inside, leaves the door open—Jefferson Eads keeps filming—and then he follows her inside.
There is a mercy in the world. It does not exist everywhere at all times, but is present in places, and moves in tendrils and wisps. Jefferson Eads decides he doesn't want or need the footage of her with the walker—that the images he got were good enough, were more than good enough, and that the walker footage would dilute the stronger footage.
He had originally intended to show diminishment but has changed his mind. He's not sure why, because it happens so rarely; once the electricity of a thought, a desire, a goal, starts flowing through him, lighting up some circuitry but leaving other circuitry dark, he follows it through to the end.
To deviate from that one slender course would create in him the most extreme form of agitation.
And yet: that evening he knows the momentary peace of completion. He's done with her: he feels he has pretty much inhabited, in a quick ripple of something, each of her long years, that he has an artistic knowledge of them now, even if he sometimes has trouble crossing the bridges to an understanding of other people's emotions and how those emotions govern their decisions.