by WD Clarke
—It’s wonderful that the 2 of you are so close, after….
—Close isn’t exactly the word, he said, but, but you never know.
—You’re ok around here for today, if that’s what you’re worried about, she said.
—No, I wasn’t, but how do you mean?
—Well, when you didn’t turn up this morning I called home, got no answer, and since I had no idea where you were I took the liberty of getting Dr. Fraschetti to take your afternoon ward rounds with the residents. I wouldn’t normally have done that, obviously, but….
—But what?
—But I sensed you were in some kind of trouble.
—No, not ‘trouble’, exactly, it’s … complicated. We’ll talk about it sometime, when you’re back. But, I just wanted to say thank you, Agnes, he said sincerely. And you know, it’s funny but, I mean, for 9 years now, more, I’ve thought about nothing else….
He gestured, taking in, in a sweeping arc, the entirety of the clinic.
—And then suddenly … , he added, but then broke off into a kind of bemused, childish state of wonderment.
—I know exactly what you mean, she said. Their eyes met briefly.
—Anyhow, he said, a bit embarrassed and self-conscious now.
—Thank-you, Ed. For everything.
—You’re, you’re welcome, he said, looking down, and blushing. Turning away now, towards the front entrance, he raised a significant, salutatory hand.
—Well, she said.
—Well, he said, best be off, business—you know….
—Of course, she said. I know.
As he walked down the corridor ‘flicking’ his ‘switch’ back and readying himself to process what Nurse Sloggett had just told him and to calculate how it all might affect Buddy, he met Missy Plumtree at the elevators, his Grinch heart growing almost another half-size upon seeing her alive—and—um, alive, at any rate. She looked terrible; she looked beautiful. And (and this was new to him, to be sure) he saw: he saw that she was caught up in emotions, many powerfully negative, the content and import of which were far beyond his ken. But, he had to admit, here was a young woman who looked … vibrant wasn’t the exact word. She looked, she looked—alive.
—Hello, Dr. Blanchette, she said.
—Miss….
—I’m sorry I missed our appointment this morning.
— … sus Plumtree, I.
He cut himself short. He wasn’t sure what he was about to say, but whatever it was, he didn’t say it. He looked at, smiled at, gesticulated at her, meaninglessly. He eventually heard himself say something, something to the effect that it didn’t matter, that he had been worried about her, that he was glad that she was….
Pointing at his nose?
—Who did that to you? she said.
—Well, he said, er….
She guessed at it. —I’m so, she said.
—Not your fault, he said.
—No, yes, she said. I’ve been a guilty bystander in my own life for too long, Doctor. You see, I’ve come to tell you that I’m quitting.
—The?
—Him, my husband, yes, and school and … everything.
—You haven’t been thinking of… ?
—No, she said, not since I’ve stopped taking….
—Your medication.
—Sorry. I meant to tell you earlier, but I’m also quitting seeing you. No offence intended.
—None taken, he said. But may I ask why? he said simply.
—May I be honest? she said.
—Naturally.
She frowned, bit her ring fingernail for a second. And then, (and why were people doing this so G-ddamn much lately?) she looked him square in the eye.
—No, I don’t think we are naturally honest, Doctor. I think that we are lying to each other and ourselves, oh, 95% of the time? And that’s what sanity amounts to: everyone agreeing to believe that our lies are true.
He’d heard this one before, too many times to count, really, but not from Missy of course. He had to admit, however, that there did seem to be some truth to that old hoary psychoanalytic guesstimation that depression usually accompanied repressed anger of some kind, usually this kind: the anger of those who had never and most likely could never (without medical assistance, mind you) doff themselves of their biological chains, come out of their personal caves, and adjust, however hypo-plastically, to the harsh light of the only reality that mattered: social reality. Missy, like the unending parade of other misfortunates he had treated, paradoxically needed Alba to even begin to entertain the notion that it was precisely Alba that she didn’t need. Alba was giving her the confidence to believe that she could make it on her own, that there was a reality to pursue (and here lay the roots of his deep, dark antipathy towards those fraudulent purveyors of the talking cure), a reality deeper than that which had been socially and genetically constructed for her. Zealots like Randy Van der Griff and his sidekick little Stuey indulged in hyperbole, to be sure, but they weren’t as far off the mark as one might ‘think’: Alba works—of this there could be no question. The only question, of course (and he was ashamed to admit that he had gotten a bit unduly paranoid about the matter of late—but then, he’d had a strange, shall we say, last couple of days) concerned tweaking the kinetics of it, to keep the adverse reactions to within a percentile or so of the statistical sweet spot. Oh, Alba was working, all right, and that’s why she was quitting it. It was all so common, yet none the less pathetic. But he did ‘feel’ for her, for Missy here. He really did.
—So, he said gently, or as gently as he could, where to now, Missy?
She smiled with nervous confidence.
—G-d knows, she said.
A minor brainwave sent Ed skulking (and why should or would he be ‘skulking’, anyway? he heard himself ask himself) back inside the clinic and (Lady Luck really was on his side today) to reception, to Agnes’ desk at the nurse’s station. She was not there, good: he quickly rifled through her desk drawers, almost immediately finding what he was looking for, a nearly empty, unlabeled bottle of medication.
He poured the few remaining capsules into the palm of his hand, and picked one with his thumb-and-forefinger. He had to admit: they were, well, chic was the word, really. As much r&d cash had gone into the design and marketing as into the initial laboratory research, he said to himself, and this exaggeration, like most, contained, or rather revealed a certain truth, one which in this case made him ‘feel’ just a tad uncomfortable—although, he knew, he did ‘feel’ pretty comfortable with that.
The pills were white, of course, to go with the etymology of the name, Alba, which denotes white, but not just any white. He wondered (briefly) how savvy the young marketing lads at Eumeta really were here—he’d have to ask Randy or Stu the next time either or both of them swung through town—and he wondered just how much homework they had done on this, if it was a less-than-brilliant contrivance or just an uncongenial happenstance. For the 17th century Spanish/Portuguese name for the seabird depicted here (& oh so chummily, in miniature, its tubular snout cleverly, hyperbolically embossed on the off-white ½ of each capsule, the remainder of the bird’s head on the remaining, on the ‘white-white’ portion) connoted, at least to English speakers, something … other. Perhaps they had done their homework after all, and were indulging in a playful, little insider game of irony. Perhaps, he thought, with no small measure of superiority, but it was certainly worth taking a bet on: kids these days never looked anything up.
Then, quite suddenly, as if meditating on the blank nullity that the innocuous pill presented itself to be, a thought came thundering down upon him, in the guise of a morbid little joke, the kind one never admits to ‘thinking’ if one wishes to avoid labels such as ‘creep’, ‘bastard’—or worse. For example: he had once attended the funeral of his cousin Barbara ‘Bunny’ Corless. The family had had it held off the Island, and (unusually, but, given the circumstances, understandably) closed casket, for ‘Bunny’ or ‘Bun’ had qui
te literally topped herself with a shotgun. It was not known outside the immediate family whether it had been a 10, 12, or 410 gauge though, for the Corless patriarch, Archibald, was known to keep all 3 at the ready.
Bunny had always been her daddy’s favourite, the eldest of 6 who had inherited his keen, inquiring ‘mind’, his love of the outdoors, his weakness for the bottle, and most of all his deep antipathy toward the fiat of any authority other than his own. Bunny had thus made a big, early splash as something of an apostate, leaving the arms of both her pious mother and of Mother Church as soon as she could get her driver’s license and get herself the hell off of the Island.
Her funeral had roughly coincided with Ed’s own early troubles. Only 6 months before, his and Agnes’s families had conspired with the parish priest to whisk the almost-bursting young woman off to a convent in Petropolis, a couple of hours to the north-west. Bunny had been their sole ally & defender, and for her troublesome meddling had been awarded (at the hands of her father) a nose-and-eye as discoloured as Ed’s was today.
Nevertheless, black sheep though she undoubtedly was, family is family, and young Ed did not help his own still-problematic reputation when he made a decidedly off-colour remark at her not-quite-literal-interment. The parents were pronouncing it as ‘internment’, and Ed found himself saying to Cousin Jack (an Epsilon-Semi-Moron if ever there was one) that Bunny would have appreciated the irony in all of this. For the wise Bunny’s will had explicitly insisted upon an unsanctifiable cremation, and her on-again/off-again lover/executor Hope had bravely stood up to the islanders—to both family & Church.
It was Jack’s ugly, inbred tabula rasa stare that had made Ed keep going, nervously saying whatever popped next into his head. He pointed out to Jack how strong and dignified Hope looked, how utterly useless the priest’s brief sermon and Archie’s eulogy had been. He insisted on pouring into Jack’s uncomprehending, wax-and-ignorance-plugged ear what Jack already knew, what everybody had already known for days but what Ed himself had only just found out: that she’d done it in her father’s [twin] bed.
It was then that he had let slip his little doozey. Bunny would have laughed at it anyway, he told himself later. She would also have pointed out to Ed that it referred, in a Freudian slip kind of way, to his own situation.
—Well, Jack, he’d said, I guess the Bun is in the oven now.
But what came crashing in on him at this moment, while no less inappropriate than what he’d said to his cousin (and what Jack had—child that he was, with a childishly complete lack of mercy—repeated to all-&-sundry) was for his ears only; only he, Edward Blanchette, was there to think the less of himself for thinking it—neither Missy, nor Nurse Sloggett (er, Agnes), both of whom were, thankfully, still alive, and not his wife either, who was by now only G-d knew where:
—Well, he said, 2 down: 2 down, & 1 to go.
26
What Do Numbers Mean?
What do numbers mean?
I’m About 17.
—Jonathan Richman
He Began to realise just how worried part of him really was when he found himself standing stock-still in his wife’s bathroom, the doors to her vanity wide open, his shod feet surrounded by bottles, vials, tubes, canisters, droppers, boxes & samples of nearly every product imaginable. How could he have been content to merely peruse the medicine cabinet before? Was his head even nominally screwed on? Now, finally, he had gone the whole hog: not only had he checked, re-checked & triple-checked all of the blatantly obvious containers of pharmaceuticals (after all, she’d been known to hide forbidden amphetamines [good for her diet, bad for pretty well everything else, including Ed] in bottles of anti-hypertensives, and had often secreted contraband, ‘natural’ remedies into prescription bottles for her liver, kidney & thyroid), but he’d checked & re-checked everything else too. And he’d turned up nothing—nothing that he’d wanted to turn up, that is, for there were revelations aplenty. For starters, there were so many lengtheners, strengtheners, straighteners, toners & clarifiers, exfoliate-, coruscate-, intensificate- & precipitat-ors that, immediately after wondering (rather nastily, he heard a small, unheeded voice say) why these things had not made his wife more beautiful, he immediately felt an intense (if ephemeral) sense of devastation: was he really so remote from her, so … so Mosaic, that he could not have noticed this before?
Yes, yes & yes, to be frank—and then it was off to the other containers, in their other hiding places. For example, he found so many of these ‘alternative’ ‘medicines’ that it made him wonder just how long he had neglected to bother checking up on her: 1 bottle even came from a homeopathic so-called ‘pharmacy’, which was aping the style of the orthodox establishments in a pathetic attempt at auto-legitimation.
Anyhow, the label read ‘Blanchette, Deward’ (which itself alone was very strange), 29-01-93, Lycopodium 200ch, dosage: pellets under tongue or dissolved in water 1x/day for 3 days. Huh. Another, a herbal absurdity labelled Masculine Complex, bore no date but managed to slightly pique his curiosity if not his interest. In all, there were at least 2 dozen packages of such inanities, 1 of which was called (go figure) MarsAtaxia. Worse still, there was something, produced by a San-Luis Obispo firm called Phallocentrium which actually bore a kosher pharmacy label, made out to a Dr. Weda Blanchette, dated 13-02-93, and which was calling itself Amor=Us.
But there was no Alba to be found anywhere. He collected everything off the floor, fitted it all into one large green garbage bag (which he put by the door), went to call himself yet another taxi, but on a hunch poked his nose outside. A small, but real sense of vindication brightened his day; it was warming up considerably. On another hunch, he rolled his small winnings over and placed a bet on giving the Peugeot a go. Payday! It started up. Perfect. He left it to warm the cockles of its internally combusting heart, dashed back inside to get his coat & gloves, and, on impulse, snatched up his Dictät! (an inferior grey-market Dictaphone knock-off, given out to all department Chairs by the hospital quartermaster) from its charging base.
Soon he was motoring past the city limits, in the general direction of Enterprise. Hills gave way to flat farmland, reclaimed from postglacial swamps by severe, unflinching Ulster Orangemen and their Scottish counterparts. Here, low stratocumulus seemed to have stagnated at the behest of the dull, static landscape. It had been years since he’d been back—27 in fact, but nothing much seemed to have changed.
There is no rolling thunderclap—just one big bang, probably a sizzle as the lightening leaves the ground. Those most prone to being struck are isolated people [….]
—Alan Watts, The Weather Handbook
In my dream I am always 17—I’m just on the cusp, and so is the season, whichever it is. Cold and warm are forever colliding, or is it the other way around? There is no way to tell—there is a graying sameness about, the sameness of waning, or at least that’s what the script always has me think as I strut and fret on the ferry, as it never fails to take me to the mainland (and, I never once pause to doubt), to you.
And I’m never lacking in confidence; I’ve got my savoir-vivre working overtime as I self-assuredly navigate my father’s truck to your father’s farm. And life’s pretty well all—well, 90–95% all, anyway—sussed out, I figure. And it’s not that I’m unaware, exactly, that those other 5–10 or so 100ths are still out there, around the next curve somewhere, waiting to make a fool, a rube, a moron of me. I know this.
But I’m 17, remember, and I don’t really know anything, and that, Agnes, is why I’m on my way to you. I’ve given you that 5∕100ths, to plant, to nurture, to coax into some kind of reality for me, so we can have & hold it, ‘till death do us part, etc. Or, that’s what I’m thinking anyway, those are my plans as, as I drive, as I find, as I make (or so I think) my way to you….
And in the dream you’re always waiting for me. And that’s always on my ‘mind’, too, as the truck takes me through the curves just north of town, just as I’m doing now. That’s what I’m thinking i
n the dream, and it’s what I’m thinking now: what really matters is that you’re always patiently waiting for me, just as I’m always impatient for these curves to straighten out & deliver me onto the straight and thru-way thru the Cavan Swamp, to you—and thus, somehow, to some truer version of me.
It is always (I’m guessing here) 1967, or that’s what it feels like. There’s no radio in the truck, but I’ve got ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, your favourite, ‘Down to New Orleans’, playing in my head. And I’m remembering how one of your older brothers came back from a trip to England with a suitcase full of what he called r&b bands, with strange names like The Yardbirds, Them, The Animals. Also Chicago bluesmen like Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. This isn’t in the dream now, but it’s connected—you’d understand this—because this is always how we talked, wasn’t it? I remember. The music made even the Beatles seem tame & timid to us by comparison, and it made us hungry for whatever was over our parents’ shrunken horizon; it made us want more.
Anyway, in the dream that’s what I’m always singing and feeling, and I’m feeling that it’s true—what you’ve always said, ‘like I’m being let in on something’, something real and important. To both of us. Real Life, capital-R, capital-L. And then the curves suddenly straighten and I begin to see those wetlands and that’s how I come to know, in my dream, that this is not just a dream.
You’ve planted those 5∕100ths of me in the last patch of good, fertile soil this side of the Canadian Shield, like the sunflower seeds you’ve planted in that clear window box in the kitchen. And the last thing you always say is always the same, as you trace their pathway of hopeful germination with your forefinger: how they always grow in 2 directions at once—towards the centre, towards uncertainty….