Gaelan lingers, aware of the sudden quiet, the cooling sheets, the vacated wet spot.
The Silent Killer of Young Adults. That was the moniker for MS, the tagline that some savvy Manhattan adman dreamed up to accompany public service announcements intended to call attention to Hope’s disease (a disease that up to that point didn’t have the name recognition of cancer, say, or polio).
MS, the public service announcer intoned bleakly, as the silhouette of an upright, presumably healthy human was seen to shrink incrementally, collapse in on itself, and eventually transform into the silhouette of a feeble, hunched nonentity imprisoned in a wheelchair, The Silent Killer of Young Adults.
These PSAs played on television over and over when Gaelan was a child. The ads scared the shit out of him, even before his mother was diagnosed. The word silent gave the phrase its insidious threat and terrifying power. A noisy killer would be preferable. At least a person could hear him coming. But a silent killer. Gaelan imagined MS creeping into his mother’s bedroom—like Dracula wearing a gray flannel suit and rubber-soled shoes—and offing her while she slept.
Gaelan remembers feeling protected by his quilt—the one his mother made for him when he was a baby, the one that stayed on his bed until they lost everything. A re-creation of that quilt now covers his bed. Claudia didn’t ask many questions about it. She may have never asked about it at all; Gaelan doesn’t remember precisely.
Theirs was an especially nonverbal relationship, bountifully orgasmic but conversationally sparse. She tasted like lake water; she had a pleasant, weedy smell, especially behind her ears; and she told him once that having an orgasm was like going over a waterfall.
Gaelan always asks his lovers how they experience orgasm. Women have such a way with words. No two of them describe it the same way. It’s essential to Gaelan that he give his mind and body over to whatever image his lovers describe—embroidering it, finding his place within it.
He doesn’t consider himself promiscuous, no matter how many women he’s seeing concurrently. A promiscuous person doesn’t invest thoroughly and tirelessly in the specific imaginings of their lovers. A promiscuous person doesn’t consider himself a failure if his partner doesn’t come.
Is he incapable of intimacy? Hard to say.
During the workweek, after he leaves the studio, Gaelan trains at the gym for two hours. He goes to sleep at seven o’clock; his alarm rings at two in the morning. Saturdays and Sundays are given over to longer sessions at the gym with his personal trainer, errands, an occasional drive down to Emlyn Springs, a movie with Larken. This schedule requires Gaelan to take a certain kind of lover, one who’s available to develop a relationship Mondays through Fridays between 3:30 and 6:30 P.M. In Gaelan’s experience, this precludes a large segment of the dating population. It narrows the range of possible interactions. On the plus side, afternoon sex always feels illicit, even if adultery isn’t involved. Gaelan enjoys this; he assumes the women do, too.
Is he addicted to sex? Possibly.
Without question, Gaelan loves the potency of women, the way his feelings for them translate into something as physically unequivocal as an erection. He loves the grounded feeling that women give him. They seem so enviably secure in their attachment to the earth—which is strange, given their lightness, the funny impractical shoes they wear, their obsession with losing weight. No matter how much Gaelan builds his own body, stacks it with supplements, buttresses it with muscle, he never feels as though he has the same relationship to gravity that women do. But when he is inside them, he feels moored and safe, and he knows that he will not float away.
He will miss Claudia. He misses all of them, every woman who has ever left.
He is not sad, exactly. He is definitely not heartbroken, nothing as dramatic as that. He feels only a vague grayness, a wilting malaise.
He should get up, call one of the other women he is seeing. It’s late, it’s Friday, but one of them might be free to meet him later, at the movies maybe, where it’s cool.
Of course, it’s hot and muggy, that’s why he’s so lethargic.
Kate and Spencer, Gaelan’s cats, jump onto the bed. They begin nuzzling the vacant niche behind his knees, purring. He shouldn’t nap; it will be that much harder to go to sleep tonight.
The quilt from his side-lying perspective is sharply foreshortened, terrestrial; its folds and patches look like exotically terraced farmland. He could be a reclining giant—like Paul Bunyan, Hercules of the West, savior of small-town America, a hero with the power to reroute rivers, stanch floods, fell timbers, tame cyclones.
Gaelan closes his eyes, just for a few minutes. He’ll get up soon and figure out what to do for the rest of the day.
Dead mothers have the ability to see their children not only as they are, but as they were, all at once. Their vision is insectlike, prismatic and complex; but whereas a fruit fly, bumblebee, or mosquito sees only the big-screen-close-up NOW—a bumpy, cast-off avocado peel projected from several angles; a geodesic dome of human flesh in the form of a big, juicy, perspiring toe—each plane in a dead mother’s eyes presents a scene from a different point in time.
So as Aneira Hope Jones is being borne home on a sudden, super-charged current of energy generated by her living husband, she sees her children not only in what the living refer to as the present moment; she is afforded other views. This simultaneity of vision is a gift that Hope is experiencing for the first time; understandably, she is confused by it, not yet in control, more of a passenger riding its power than the entity driving it.
Patience, please. Eventually she will become more proficient.
Here is Larken, her oldest, caught in some falsehood.
Hope perceives this clearly, yet cannot exactly define the nature of the lie.
She is talking excitedly to a small group of people, two men, one woman—all are so much older than she—at a party. She is talking …
Can that be right?
… about rodents.
“… and the marvelous innovation in the Mérode,” Larken is saying, “one that secures its place, undeniably I believe, at the leading edge of the Renaissance rather than the tail end of the Gothic …”
Now Hope understands. The falsehood arises not from what she is saying, but from what she is thinking.
“… is this nascent development of a unique and private symbolism. With Joseph and the mousetrap …”
Ah. Mice.
“… Campin radicalizes religious painting.”
She is thinking about food.
“He is developing a visual language that originates—for the first time—not from established church doctrine, not from notions imposed upon him by his patrons …”
She wants to snatch that brie-smeared slice of bread from the bald man’s plate—an act of rebellion—and stuff it entire into her mouth.
“… but from his own imagination. What could be more modern?”
Why is she smiling when she feels so ashamed?
In other views, Larken is a baby, crying, crying, driving Hope mad.
I do not miss this. Lord, no.
Hope sees that it is hunger, always, that makes Larken cry, not loneliness or fear or overstimulation or fatigue. She is simply hungry.
With Gaelan, Hope knows better.
Easy baby.
Whenever he cries, Hope feeds him, and he is happy.
At the breast, all attention. He could drain me faster and with more ferocity than either of the girls.
“Look, Mama!” Gaelan shouts, three years old and jubilant in bubbles. “My penis is frozen!”
In cotton Jockeys at the age of eight, smiling, sheepish, he comes in to pee while she is trying to apply lipstick. “Mom,” he says, his hands held lightly over his erection, “could I please have some privacy?”
At callow sixteen with his first love.
His only?
The hush, the sanctity, the terror, the heat. Young hands mapping new terrain.
“That feels nice,”
he tells the girl.
An Emlyn Springs girl. What is her name?
Not asking for more, not expecting more, not knowing yet that there can be more, because it is all delicious now, all miraculous, that intersecting bodies can bring such incomparable joy, a heaven on earth. He asks the girl:
Bethan, that’s it. The Ellises’ youngest. Lived across the highway from us.
“Does this feel nice? Do you like it?”
With everyone since, he keeps his eyelids open the tiniest crack when he’s kissing. So restless in his lovemaking. All his women perceive it and in the end it drives them all away.
Home and alone—a man in this view, handsome, not happy—Gaelan dreams of a kite in a cloudless sky. He wonders who is flying the kite; he cannot quite see them and he wants to see. His hand, in sleep, finds his penis, a comfort.
Silly boy. He’s the one who’s flying the kite.
With Hope’s youngest child comes a tangle of visions: screams and cries, spinning wheels, frantic winds.
“No! It’s not trash!” Bonnie screams, her small fists clenched around crumbs, stones, empty matchbooks, all manner of garbage. “No! I won’t let you throw it away!”
Through all of time, Bonnie rides a bike.
Oh yes. This one. I called her “the little pedaler” when she quickened.
She subsists on nothing. She speaks mostly to the dead and dying. She is almost mad. Hope turns away from these views; they’re too plentiful, too painful.
Here’s Bonnie, adult in her makeshift kitchen.
Does she really live there?
Outside, as the thunderstorm builds, Bonnie unloads things from a saddlebag contraption: more refuse. And yet she treats these bits of trash with the kind of gentleness afforded to religious artifacts. A torn piece of paper bearing a handwritten list: Paint the nursery. Buy diapers. The clothes—where
That sounds familiar.
A circle cut from cotton cloth.
That looks familiar.
A metal lid from a Hellman’s mayonnaise jar. As Hope notes the holes punched into it, her vision takes in Bonnie, small again.
This is so confusing.
She is five years old, and there, close by—
At last. All three.
—are her brother and sister, at eleven and twelve.
Gaelan holds the nail—“Ouch! Ouch!”—while Larken hammers the holes—“Sorry! Sorry!”—while Bonnie chatters:
“And tonight after dinner we’ll catch them and put them inside the jar very gently and they’ll be able to breathe but not get away and Mommy can read to me by their light, that’s what she told me. I like main ace, don’t you?”
Main Ace. I forgot she used to say it like that.
“I don’t like mustard but I do like ketchup. Miss Williams says it like ‘cats up.’ Did you ever notice that? Isn’t that funny? And I like pickles too. But not sweet relish.”
“Ouch!”
“Sorry!”
“OUCH! Geez, Larken …”
Llewellyn is on the golf course; Hope is with them all.
“Time of death,” Bud Morrison, the paramedic, pronounces.
I know him. I know all those men.
Bud looks at his watch as they stand in the rain. “Time of death, three fifty-nine.”
And at the instant Hope’s husband is borne skyward, riding a small white sphere into the jet stream; something loosens in her living children. Simultaneously they each let forth with fluids:
In Larken’s womb, there’s a sudden, floodlike sloughing of blood. “Shit,” she mutters, mortified, mid-sentence. It can’t be, she’s thinking, it’s not time for my period, but blood is pouring down her legs. No time for a polite Midwestern exit. She clamps her thighs, knees, and ankles together, abruptly turning away from the puzzled/concerned/shocked faces of the people she was talking to, and starts to waddle toward the bathroom like a bad parody of a graceless geisha.
Who is holding the kite? Gaelan wonders as he dreams. He’s anxious. The kite has been let out all the way; it’s six miles high, dangerously close to the jet stream. What if the string breaks? What if the end hasn’t been secured to the spool? His eyes follow the kite string down, down, down, but he cannot locate the kite-flier. It’s a ghost kite without a captain. The string goes taut. It twangs, it vibrates. The kite stops making swallow dives and loops and becomes frozen like a lollipop at the end of a stick. Gaelan wakes as he comes, ashamed, confused.
Bonnie is placing her new artifacts in their archival setting: an oversized, clothbound book, like a ledger. There are many other books like this; they line the shelves of her woodshed, organized by a system that only Bonnie understands. She has already recorded captions (Quilt Scrap, Mayonnaise Lid from Jar for Children’s Lightning Bugs, To-Do List for Baby), the date (August 15, 2003), and the time (approximately 15:30 hours) when she made her most recent finds. Location? Bonnie pauses. As she retraces her route mentally, she realizes where her artifacts were found—on her family’s land, on the spot where the Farmer Elves made their visitations. She gives over to sobs so wrenching that it seems they will never abate.
In unison, their bodies sing: blood, semen, tears.
And now they are scattering again. They were in a singular orbit but have spun apart and are off on different courses.
Hope makes a few quick notes in her diary, characterizing her children as she has newly glimpsed them:
Larken: Heavy, judgmental, fraudulent, afraid.
Gaelan: Closed, disconnected, libidinous, un-self-aware.
Bonnie: Imprisoned, silent, obsessed.
Liars, all of them. And all so humorless!
This is nothing like what I wanted, but probably what I deserve. No one’s a bigger liar than me.
The living see only that bit of thread on the spool that has been unwound.
But the dead see everything, through whatever set of eyes they choose.
After all, it is all there.
Chapter 5
Annunciation Through
the Wires
Viney dries her hands on a dish towel before answering the phone. She has been standing at the sink, washing vegetables and keeping an eye on the weather, getting ready to make a double serving of Dr. Walker’s Salad Number 5.
She feels steady and calm after doing her yoga routine. Her third eye is open. The table is set. The oven is preheating. The rain has let up but it’s surely too wet at the club to play; Welly will be home soon and in need of electrolytes. Chilling in the fridge are two martini glasses filled with freshly pressed cucumber and celery tonic.
“Hello, Viney.”
“Bud. What’s happened?”
Alvina Closs, a woman who has received news of many deaths in her life—and of deaths far more terrible and rending than this—recognizes a quality of tone in Bud’s voice: sluggish, ponderous, contrite, as if the messenger is already laboring gracelessly under the weight of the newly departed, as if his voice is struggling to hold the coffin and its contents aloft. As Bud tells the story, Viney receives her share of this weight; she sits down at the kitchen nook table and listens. Her hands are blanched in places and shriveled from scrubbing the vegetables; the dish towel is damp in her lap and streaked with dirt.
“He must have misjudged the storm is all I can think,” Bud is saying, “maybe thought it was gonna blow over. Believe me, Viney, we did everything we could. He was gone as soon as we got to him. Honestly, I don’t think he knew what hit him. It was that fast.”
What was the man thinking? Alvina asks herself, at the same time sensing that, if she chose, she could easily penetrate the translucency of this question. She is reminded of that popular novelty: an eight ball, sized like a small cantaloupe and hard as glass. You asked a question and shook it and peered through a tiny triangular window and waited until words floated up, as if through muddied waters, leaving you in suspense until you saw clearly, irrefutably: Yes. No. Maybe. Not Likely. Try Again. Wait and See. The answer to Viney’s question is already
formed, waiting beneath a murky surface. But she can’t bring herself to see it, not yet.
Hope? she thinks, and it only takes this one word to summon a palpable presence and the beginning of sorrow, if not acceptance. What do I do now?
Easier questions are being posed: Does Viney want to notify the kids herself, Bud wonders, or should he do it? The same with the pastor at the Bethel Welsh Methodist Church. He’d be happy to make the phone calls. All she has to do is say the word.
“I’ll tell the kids,” Viney answers. “It should come from me. But you can call Pastor Huw if you don’t mind, Bud. That would be a help.”
“Sure, Viney.”
“Is the mayor already over at Mal’s?”
“He is.”
So it will be this, Viney thinks, all over again: She’ll drive the five blocks to McKeever’s Funeral Home, make that trip up the porch steps, through the leaded glass door, across the silent, airless foyer with its heavy velvet curtains, and from there to the basement. (The McKeevers and their employees know what to expect from Alvina Closs by now; they won’t even try to invoke funeral home regulations to keep her out of the prep room.) She will breathe in that nauseating, sweet, lung-searing cocktail of smells—formaldehyde, putrefaction, paste wax. She will set her feet wide on the slick, bilious-yellow linoleum that’s covered the morgue floor since the 1950s, next to the gurney, within a breath’s distance of the sheet that Mal—or one of his sons—will draw aside. She’ll stand again over that hollow, empty house of horrors that is the body in death. How can this flesh—such a source of joy in our lives—become such an obscenity, and so soon? Only yesterday she and Welly made love.
What was he thinking? she repeats. Why on earth did he go like that?
“Good,” she says. “I’ll get over there as soon as I get ahold of the kids.”
“Okay then, Viney. Me and Vonda will be over later to check on you.”
“Thanks, Bud.”
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