McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  Right out of college I had a job as an insurance claims investigator. My hours were long and erratic. Left alone in the house, she kept falling down and hurting herself. Broke her arm one time, cut her forehead open another time. Finally I put her in a home. I got her to sign the papers one night when she was really drunk. She was furious when I took her to the home and dropped her off. She called me every name she could think of. And she told me I’d never amount to anything. Screaming at me as I walked out the door.

  For the first year or so, I didn’t go near her. Then she had a stroke, and they called me up, so I went over to see her. I needn’t have worried. After the stroke, she seemed to be calmer. And they had her sedated, too. I don’t know what. Anyway, she was better. Not so abusive.

  I flipped the picture on the piano down so I didn’t have to look at it. I was careful when I put it down, so I wouldn’t scratch the polished surface. Then I thought, What the fuck. I took the picture and held it on edge, and gouged a big scratch into the piano. It dug through the polished black surface, leaving a white scratch. I gouged another, and another. Made the piano look like hell.

  I began to wonder why I had never done this before. I hated this fucking piano. I didn’t know why I had left it here all these years. I told myself I didn’t know what to put in its place. It took up a lot of space in the living room and I would have to redecorate if it was gone.

  Well, I’d have to redecorate now.

  I thought maybe Mother would like to see her piano. I went out to the car to get the digital camera, but her eyesight isn’t good anymore, and I thought maybe she couldn’t see the little screen at the back. So I opened the glove compartment for the Polaroid, and it fell out along with the gun. The damn glove compartments just aren’t large enough in newer cars. I don’t know what the manufacturers are thinking. Saving money, cutting corners, screwing the consumer. The usual shit.

  I picked the gun off the floor and put it on the seat, and took the Polaroid back inside. I took several pictures of the scratches from different angles, but none really showed them off to advantage. I wasn’t sure Mother would really notice. But I owed her a visit anyway.

  I went back to the kitchen, had another belt, and smoked a satisfying cigarette. Janis never let me smoke in the house, but those days were over. I stubbed the butt out in the sink, relishing the black crust against the porcelain. Like gunpowder against pale skin.

  Then it was time to see Mother.

  She was in a very nice home on Third Street, opposite a church. The building was from the fifties, single story, ranch-style, designed not to look institutional. The sign was made from cutout white letters and said “SeaSide Convalescent.” It was at least five miles from the ocean, but it had a pleasant ring.

  I parked down the block, and scooped up the Polaroids. The gun was still on the passenger seat and I couldn’t leave it there so I stuck it in my pocket, pulled on my jacket, and went inside.

  The SeaSide lobby was small with a cheery ocean motif, sea fans and starfish painted on the walls. You didn’t mind the bedpan smell. The room was crowded with three elderly women in wheelchairs, waiting to be taken somewhere. One of the women was reading a book, one was asleep, and the other was just staring at nothing.

  The receptionist was a harried, frowning fat lady who was talking on the phone. I heard her say, “They’ve been waiting an hour, George,” and then she listened a moment. “It’s too early for your lunch break, George, get your ass over here.” With the phone to her ear, she glanced up at me, still frowning.

  I said, “I’m here to see Mrs. Chambers.”

  “And you are?”

  “Her son.”

  She held out her hands, snapped her fingers. “Identification?” Into the phone she said, “George, did you hear anything I said?”

  I gave her my driver’s license. She hardly looked at it.

  “George, damn it, you better get over here now. Someone might decide to call the INS, you know what I mean?” She cupped her hand over the phone. To me: “You know where she is?”

  I said I did.

  “Go ahead.”

  I slipped past the wheelchairs, and went down a long hallway. The doors to individual rooms were open on either side. Cheerful sunlight poured in. But people in the rooms looked insubstantial as ghosts against the white bed linen, and the hallway smelled faintly of beef stew. Or something like that.

  Mother was in a room near the back. It looked out onto a small enclosed garden with potted trees. You could see a row of garbage cans off to one side. She was sitting in a wheelchair, watching a soap opera.

  I said, “Hello, Mother.”

  She looked over at me and said nothing. For a moment I had a flash of panic, thinking she didn’t recognize me. Then she gave that evil little smile of hers. “Well. It’s about time.”

  “Miss me?”

  “You’re a joke.” She turned away from me to the television.

  I said, “I wanted you to see some pictures I took today.”

  “Still peeping in bedrooms for a living?”

  “Only yours.” I took the Polaroids and spread them out on her lap, one after another, like cards.

  She frowned. “What’s this?”

  “Your piano.”

  “It’s all messed up.”

  “That’s right, Mother.”

  “You can’t take care of anything, can you?”

  “No,” I said. “I did this myself.”

  She didn’t understand. She shrugged and looked back at the television. I heard a voice say, “Margo, you’ll never get away with this, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Mother,” I said. “I did this to your piano.”

  She sighed. “Why don’t you grow up, Ray? How old are you now, anyway?”

  “And you know what I’m going to do next? I’m going to have someone come in with an axe, and smash it up, and burn it for firewood.”

  “You smell like liquor.”

  “Are you listening, Mother?”

  She turned to me, suddenly interested. “Got any with you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. But you can’t have it.”

  “It’s in your pocket. I can see it.”

  She was seeing the gun. “No,” I said. “It’s not liquor. And you can’t have it.”

  “I don’t care, Ray. Why do you bother to come here? I don’t care if I never see you again.”

  “I thought you’d want to see the piano.”

  She swept her hand across her lap, sending the pictures flying. “You worthless piece of shit.”

  “Now, Mother.”

  She paused. She squinted at me. “What happened, did she leave you?”

  “Who?”

  “She did, didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s why you’re here. Stinking of scotch at eleven in the morning.” She sat back in the wheelchair. “You want to make it my fault. Your worthless life is my fault. Your good-for-nothing life is my fault. Christ. What a disappointment you are. You pussy. Give me the fucking bottle in your pocket.”

  “It’s not a bottle,” I said. I brought out the gun to show her. “It’s this.”

  “I’m so impressed. Put your little penis away, dear.”

  I just stood there. It was always the same with her. I had some idea when I came to visit her, some plan for how things would go, but it never turned out right. She could always change things around. I continued to hold the gun in my hand because I didn’t want her telling me what to do. But I felt foolish.

  “Put it away, Ray. You might scare the nurses.” She sighed, and rolled her eyes upward. “And to think that once I had hopes for you.”

  I bent over in front of her wheelchair, and began to pick up the pictures of the scratched piano. She smacked me on the head. “Get away from me, you little turd.”

  I don’t know exactly what happened but when I looked up the gun went off, firing past her ear. It shattered the window behin
d her. The noise was loud. There was smoke in the room. I said, “Mother, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it—”

  “You can’t do anything right, can you? Look at the mess you made. They’re going to charge you for it.”

  Because I wanted to scare her, because I wanted her to take that back, because I was angry, I stood up and shoved the gun against her forehead, the barrel right above her eyes. I said, “Mother, this is it.”

  “This is nothing,” she hissed.

  So I shot her and her brains spattered all over the back of the room, like sticky red-and-white cottage cheese. Now the room was really a mess, I thought. People were yelling somewhere down the hall. I saw a nurse poke her head in and then run off, screaming, “He has a gun!” My mother’s head was tilted way back on her neck, at an extreme angle. So I could only see her chin and her nostrils. Blood was dripping onto the floor from the back of her head. Maybe it wasn’t my day, I thought. But it wasn’t hers, either. From out in the hallway, a guy yelled for me to put the gun down, so I put it down. I felt better then.

  Weaving the Dark

  By LAURIE KING

  As the darkness gathered around her,

  she embarked upon the greatest adventure

  of her life—in her own backyard.

  We’re all blind to something—the mind’s eye can’t hold every-thing at once. And we’re all dying—just some more rapidly than others.

  But platitudes were only so much whistling in the dark, mantras to reassure the senses, soothe the terrors, distract the rat-mind gnawing at the vitals. The truth of the matter was, Janna was dying and Suze Blackstock was more the type to blast the dark with a bonfire than whistle into it. Suze did not want to be soothed, not even when she woke, as she did now, to an unrelieved blackness. Ah shit, she thought. It’s gone, I’m blind.

  And it had happened while she slept, not even a last flicker to grab on to, or to wish goodbye.

  Then rationality elbowed its way to the fore: Maybe it actually was still dark. This was, after all, a place without streetlights, so it could be—

  But no. She didn’t just wake; she’d been awakened by . . . yes, by the sound of digging, a shovel blade biting into soil. That meant Andy was here. And builders did not work in the dark of night, not even eccentric, senior-citizen odd-job-men builders like Andy.

  So, that was it, then. Her optic nerves had given up the fight, closed down in the night, died. Once, she’d been left in a desert without water; another time she spent a week trapped by a blizzard, but she’d never been abandoned so completely, never left with two vestigial lumps on her face that would do nothing more than dribble weak tears, as they did now onto the pillow. She lay back, prodding the soft, useless skin and the wet, cowardly lashes, then pressed down in a sudden spasm of anger that she hadn’t even been there to see her sight off. And the night flared in reaction.

  She froze, then flipped over and stretched for the big flashlight under the edge of the bed, kept there for times like this when she needed to know that the world of light was still there for her. She fumbled after the handle, knocked it away, lunged for it and thumbed the switch and—light! The brilliance of it assaulted her retinas, blinding her with glory, making her head spin with relief. She laughed, even, and patted her eyelids in apology, loving the wetness of the lashes, the slight ache from where she had pressed down hard.

  A full five minutes went by before she remembered the sound of shovel blades digging into soil. Obviously it hadn’t been the builders; Andy was a conscientious old coot, but surely he wouldn’t come out here in the middle of the night. Besides, hadn’t he finished with the retaining wall?

  She switched off the beam and sat, listening, but the noise did not come again. After a while, she stowed the light in its place under the edge of the bed and got back under the covers, wondering, as she’d wondered for the past five weeks, just what the hell she was going to do.

  Suze Blackstock had always been a woman who met her fears head-on. From the day she took her first steps she’d been called a tomboy, a reckless kid, a daredevil. The pattern of her adult life had been set when a high school boyfriend turned first possessive, then violent, and in a desperate bid for self-respect, she’d signed up for a karate class. Lesson learned: When life spit on you, pull back and let fly. She’d set out for Europe at nineteen with $104 in her pocket, spent the next six years walking and hitching across five continents, and come home with eleven dollars and change. She started skydiving at the age of thirty-one during a nasty, threat-filled divorce, the mind-blowing rush of each near-suicide stripping the mess of her life down to essentials. Rock climbing followed at thirty-seven, when her mother died in April and a close friend four weeks later. And she swallowed her claustrophobia and went caving a few years after that, when her world was crumbling in six directions at once. In each case, death looking over her shoulder steadied her; flirting with it and then walking away left her strong and cleansed. Will the parachute open this time? Will that tiny jut of rock hold me? Will the huge weight of the earth above me choose now to sigh and settle down? It was as if, when life spiraled out of control, seizing Death and staring him down was the only way to bleed off the intolerable pressures. In the face of death, she felt most alive.

  But she’d never met a pressure like the one now, measurably tiny, insidious, deadly, and taking over her life. An infinitesimal buildup of the aqueous humor inside her eyeballs, a slight malfunction in the drainage that led to an increase in pressure, and a degeneration in the sensitive nerves. Glaucoma. A pressure she’d been forced to meet, not with fury, but with patience and humility.

  Suze was forty-eight years old, a woman who’d lived with desert nomads and jungle rebels, who’d fought free of robbers in three countries, who’d lost a toe to Everest; a woman now sitting in a cabin in the woods, waiting for a half-known lover to die or to recover. Suze was really bad at patience and humility.

  She lay in the bed that had been hers for ten short weeks, remembering the power-moments in her life: the time the chute lines had tangled and she’d felt the Arizona desert rushing up at her; the sensation of looking down the barrel of an Ethiopian rebel’s gun; the incredible high when her right foot found a ledge, stopping her free fall two hundred feet from the Scottish soil below. The line between terror and exultation was so thin as to be nonexistent. And the tiny pressure in her eyes was pulling her back from that line, so far away she didn’t think she’d find it again.

  Toward dawn, Suze dozed, and when she woke, the sun shining into the room made the moment of panic brief. Still, it was there, and she hated it.

  Suze was coming to hate Courtney, too, although she took care not to show it. Courtney was Suze’s sixteen-and-a-half-year-old neighbor, housekeeper, and errand-runner—or more precisely, Janna’s neighbor, passed on to Suze in this peculiarly uncertain period. Janna had not lived here for five weeks, might (nearly time to face this) never live here again. But still Courtney came, and now that it was summer she was here four mornings a week to help Suze. She organized the bills, did the shopping, drove Suze to appointments in town, performed those daily functions that required the service of eyes that could do more than distinguish white from black. She was, Suze had to admit, sensible for a girl her age, though oddly conservative, and possessed a priceless knack for putting everything back precisely as she had found it, so that when Suze was prowling up and down the unlit house at night she didn’t trip over a stray lamp cord or bark her shins on a misplaced chair. Suze was glad for the girl’s compulsiveness, overlooked her complete lack of humor, and tried her best not to snap at the child too often.

  Today was Tuesday, so they went through the week’s mail. Bills came first.

  “The mortgage is here, and Andy’s account, and the insurance,” Courtney told her.

  “House or car?”

  “House.”

  “Then send it all down to the bank.” If it had been the car insurance, Suze would have paid it herself, since Courtney was driving Janna’s car
for Suze’s benefit.

  “And the electricity. Boy, that’s sure gone down a lot,” she said, as if the savings were the result of her own work. “When I told Mom what the bill was for March, she said we ought to have the meter checked.”

  Great, Suze thought; now the girl’s whole family knows how much Janna spends on her utilities. “I’ll pay that, and the phone bill.” She’d also pay for the propane, when it came—those costs she considered her responsibility. Not that she’d had any chance to talk the arrangement over with Janna: One minute they’d been sitting in Janna’s living room planning a trip to Tahoe; the next, Janna was slumped on the wood floor making terrifying noises while Suze scrambled to locate the dark telephone on the dark table. And five weeks after the stroke, Janna was still only half-conscious of the world around her. Tuesdays, Suze dictated a letter which the nurses assured her they read to their patient. Sundays and Thursdays, Courtney drove her thirty miles to visit the nursing home. It was an impossible situation, and not becoming any easier. She and Janna had only been together a few months; if Janna didn’t regain her senses pretty soon, her family would take over her affairs, and Janna would become a what-if in Suze’s life, a brief fling.

  But loyalty and the beginnings of love kept her here, in Janna’s cabin in the woods, edgy and frustrated and in limbo. As soon as the constrained letter to Janna was in its envelope and the checks made out (Courtney repeating her satisfaction that the winter’s enormous electrical bills had settled down) she let the girl get to the mop and the shopping, and with a sigh of relief moved over to the loom.

  As she slid onto the weaver’s bench, Suze reflected, as she had a thousand times before, how odd it was that she felt so comfortable there. This middle-aged daredevil, this adrenaline junkie who dangled from precipices, walked across continents, and flung her body out of planes into thin air, returned home to make her living as a weaver—just about the least impetuous, most encumbered, most tightly controlled art form there was. In weaving, one set of threads was strung onto five hundred pounds of loom, the other attached to a shuttle: right to left then back again, the threads locking into a pattern predetermined before the warp threads were on the loom. In weaving, there was little scope for wild improvisation even on the big hangings; in weaving, focused intensity counterbalanced the boisterous disorder of her wanderings.