by Mary Gordon
But I can tell you. She came upon something there, you could say it was by accident, but it triggered something. It could have been almost anything. How do we ever trace the charge that unearths the buried—I don’t want to call it treasure; let us call it ore. What detonates, and when and where, so that we move in one direction or another, or move at all when we are paralyzed? How does anything, ever, come to be?
. . .
It was October 10. Pearl had come to the embassy to have her passport renewed. She was waiting in the lobby and picked up Time magazine. It was two weeks after Stevie’s death.
After Stevie’s death and Breeda’s accusation she’d felt only shock, as if she’d been given a blow to the head. She couldn’t formulate a thought or concentrate on anything. There always was a ringing in her ears, like the after vibration of a siren. It was as if a sheet of slate had been pressed down on her body and her mind; her life was a dull constriction; she found it hard to breathe, eat, and sleep; she kept seeing Breeda’s face and hearing her words: His blood is on your hands. She would wake up in the midst of a fitful sleep and run to turn on the light to be sure her hands weren’t covered in blood, that her eyes were eyes and not sockets covered over with skin. She knew Breeda was right. She had insulted Stevie, taken the heart out of him, so that he cared so little about living he was careless of his life. He’d learned the carelessness from her. How could you be so stupid! A sentence spat out in an anger that erased him, to a boy who all his life had feared precisely that sentence. And it came not from an enemy but from her, whom he had trusted. Hers was the mouth.
Her heart was a stone; she could hardly move. Her limbs had lost their nimbleness; her feet feared every step as if the surface of the world might easily, at any moment, give way. She could only tense her body against something, some kind of falling through that she feared but could not yet name.
And then, in the embassy, her eye fell on an article about a seven year-old girl who had been raped and killed in a Las Vegas casino, a resort that advertised itself as “a place for the whole family.” The girl had been found dead, her neck broken, sitting on a toilet seat in a restroom of the family-friendly casino. She’d been raped and murdered around four o’clock on a Sunday morning while her father was losing money at the craps table where he’d been gambling all night.
Security officers had found the child wandering alone through the casino at one-thirty on the morning she died. They’d paged her father and turned his daughter over to him with a warning not to violate rules by allowing her to enter the gambling portion of the casino. He apologized, said it wouldn’t happen again, led his daughter back to the almost deserted “family fun” section—a video arcade next to the slot machines—and hurried back to the craps table. Alone and bored, the little girl wandered off again.
The rapist and murderer was an eighteen-year-old, a wealthy boy, good-looking, with a history of spending a lot of time in child-porn chat rooms. This brilliant young man, an honors student in his California high school, had often confided to his Net friends a desire to have sex with a child. He enticed the bored little girl into playing a game with the bright orange plastic cones set in a small part of the casino in the predawn hours to indicate danger from wet floors. She had not seen the danger. She followed the handsome boy into the bathroom, into a toilet stall. He raped her there and then broke her neck. He said he broke her neck “to take her out of her misery.” He said he knew he’d killed her when he heard the snap. He didn’t know all this was recorded on a casino surveillance camera. But it was too late; when the security guards got to the restroom, the child was dead.
Later, officials of the family-friendly casino reported that when they informed the child’s father of her death, he proposed a deal. He wouldn’t sue the casino if he was given a night of unlimited chips, unlimited beer, an airline ticket to LA, and expenses for his child’s funeral.
But there was more. A witness was discovered. The security cameras revealed that a friend of the murderer, who was with him just before the murder, had followed him and the little girl into the restroom and stood on a toilet seat in an adjacent stall to see what his friend was doing with the child. The witness, an honors student at Berkeley, was called the Bad Samaritan. There were calls in the days that followed the murder for the Bad Samaritan to be arrested too. But Nevada law did not demand that a witness stop a killing in progress or even report it.
The young man from Berkeley complained, “Now I’ll be known as a witness to a murder, not as an outstanding science student.” He said he couldn’t understand why some fellow students refused to speak to him on campus or why he was barred from attending his prom. But he expressed satisfaction with offers from television, newspapers, and magazines to tell his story.
He said, “I have a lot of remorse toward the girl’s family. They lost a loved one, and that’s a tragic event. But the simple fact remains that I do not know this little girl. I don’t know people that die of disease in Egypt, I don’t know dying children in Panama. The only person I knew in this event was my friend, and I’m sad that I lost my best friend.”
She read this article and everything came together for her. Once again, she felt alive.
She felt it all: the young girl alone at four a.m. wandering in a casino, alone in her final terror. She was with her in everything, her body took in everything. It was one of those moments when a cliché becomes lived out in the body. Pearl, too, heard a snap: she felt the snap of the girl’s neck and was snapped out of her paralysis. “I did it to take her out of her misery,” the child’s killer had said. The words took Pearl out of her own dull misery, into something else, something she wasn’t ready yet to name.
And then the other story: There was a witness. A sidebar in the magazine, a discussion in the legal community: Does a person have a legal responsibility, if not to stop a crime at least to say what he has seen? Is one compelled, morally, to witness? Is a legal compulsion the next logical step?
Witness. The word spun around in her head, images from who knows what movie, what TV show: the raised hand on the Bible: Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
I do.
She felt herself rise up from under the packed earth. The stone slab that had pressed her down below the level of life was thrown up with the force of her new rising.
Witness. The whole truth. Say what you have seen.
And it came to her, everything she had not known she had been seeing in the weeks after Stevie’s death. All the faces that had kept coming to her, randomly, now collected in an order that told her what she now knew to be the truth. The human will to harm, in all its shapes, all its varieties. Stories, faces, coming to her in the lobby of the American embassy. Witnesses that what had happened to Stevie—no, what she had done to Stevie—what had happened at Omagh, were not just isolated incidents, they were a proof of the true shape of the world: a world where the desire to harm was the most true thing that could be said about it.
The faces spun toward her: Miss Alice Stevenson and Janet Morehouse, John Lennon and Mark David Chapman. The faces of the Omagh dead. And a voice—only one—the voice of the judge: her voice, hers. Call the next witness. And after a while, no need to call them; they came readily, unbidden, spinning against the background of unliving blue, the blue that is in the background, now, of everything she sees. The blue behind her witnesses. And she would be, for her part, judge, jury, and witness herself: witness to the larger world of the crimes her witnesses had reported and the judgments she had made.
She would give her life; she would become a witness. And what is the strongest possible witness? The witness unto death.
When Pearl decided what she would do—that is to say, when she decided she would die—she wondered why it took her so long to think of it, to plan how she’d accomplish it. She wondered why, with all her books of Bobby Sands’s writings, and stories about Bobby Sands, and the pictures in the drawer of her flat and all around the
apartment, she hadn’t thought of him sooner. Bobby Sands, whose name and face are famous all over Ireland. The strong witness. The strong death.
But she would be an even purer witness. She had no demands. Nothing could stop her, nothing anyone could say or give. A strong death. In life she was overwhelmed, weak. In the purity of her death, a death no one can stop once she has set it in motion, she will be strong. Stronger than life. Stronger than this harmful life in which she too has a part, because she too has been harmful. Harmful unto death.
The back of the ambulance is open, waiting for her. The men with the crackling, buzzing gadgets hooked to their waists lower her, then slide her in. Someone else, not one of them, gets in the ambulance beside her. The door is shut with a bang. Pearl is enclosed now in the hard shell of the ambulance. The faces of her witnesses come to her, as they came in the time when she was deciding what she would do with her life; as they have come again and again since that day in the American embassy. When she decided that she would make a death of it. Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help you God. God, like Stevie, a name without a face.
Looking up a few inches only (the only space she has), she sees on the white inside roof of the ambulance, projected (but from where?) as if on a screen, Miss Alice Stevenson and Janet, and the Omagh dead—and one, not silent—John Lennon and Mark David Chapman, and she hears the music, and the words over and over, “All You Need Is Love.” Love is all you need.
Now she wants to tell her mother that was wrong. Love is not all you need. She remembers, learning in her research on starvation, that in a starving person the heart shrinks so that on an X-ray it is nearly invisible. She wonders if she has a shrunken heart. Perhaps that is why love is not all she needs, not what she needs at all.
She has never doubted that she was greatly loved. But it was not enough to let her to live in a world where her witnesses tell her there is nothing stronger than the will to harm: harm in all its varieties: harm done because it is easy, because someone has something, because someone does not have something; harm done out of carelessness or envy or fatigue, or the hunger for ascendancy, or for the sheer pleasure of lowering the fist. She had not desired to lower her fist, but her fist lowered and a young boy died. And for a long time she felt very weak; her head spun; her limbs would not move. Until she got her idea, right here in the embassy, from the article on the girl killed in the casino. The idea of witness. Witness by starvation.
The strong death.
One of the young men in uniform, encased in the ambulance shell beside her, takes her arm. “IV fluids,” she hears. They keep punching the inside of her arm, light shallow punches. “Make a fist, Miss Meyers; can you make a fist for us?” But she will not. Make a fist? The idea seems so ludicrous it makes her smile. “Almost impossible to find a vein,” the man is saying. “This level of dehydration.” He opens the door. “Get Morrisey!” she hears.
Somebody else takes his place beside her. Ties a tube around her arm below the elbow. Then the shallow punches once again. And then a piercing, hot and sharp, and someone says, Bravo.
“It’s all those years with neonates,” the woman says, the doctor, what was her name? Pearl does remember neonates. What does that mean? Oh, yes, Pearl thinks: newborns. She wants to laugh: but I am nearly newly dead. The woman pops out, fast. “Quick as you can.” The car bounces once, twice, as she gets out and the man gets in. An engine starts up. In front of her eyes, the faces of her witnesses are framed, with their stories, against cold blue. She is being driven now. She smiles, because they think they are doing something that will save her, and she knows it is much too late.
Dubliners
13
They are wheeling Pearl down a corridor. The lights shine in her eyes. She is still happy; they are too late. They lay her in a bed; they take her clothes off.
They dress her in what feels like paper. One of them holds down her hands. Another tells her to open her mouth. She refuses. They open it against her will. They shove a hard tube, the width of a pencil, into her nose and down her throat. She begins to retch. “Steady now. If you fight, you’ll make it worse.” How can she fail to fight? They are trying to steal what she has worked so hard to accomplish. A needle pierces the inside of her elbow. A tube is attached to her arm. They speak. “Pray God we’re not too late.” And worse: “The mother’s been contacted. She’s on her way.”
Don’t, she tries to say, but she knows that because of the tube she cannot be understood.
A young man stands beside the bed. “I’m Tom,” he says. “I’m a medical student. I have to be keeping an eye on you, me or one of my mates, to make sure you won’t be doing harm to yourself.”
Harm, she wants to tell him, harm; yes, harm is something I know about.
“What were you trying to say? I’ll try to help,” he says.
“Not my mother,” she says.
“You don’t want to see your mother?”
She shakes her head as hard as she can: no mother. “Tell the doctor not to let my mother in. Tell the doctor: Joseph won’t make me.”
“Joseph?”
She doesn’t answer. She has drifted away.
14
Maria is finding it difficult to pull herself up from sleep. She has dropped down or has been dropped—by her friend’s Halcyon pill—yet it seems to her that she has willed it, as if she had jumped through a hoop, like a show dog or a showgirl, but not triumphantly, not to applause, but to silence, deep snow, darkness. And because she has dropped down so far, it is a struggle for her to respond to the flight attendant’s voice. “We’re landing in Dublin.”
Dublin. Pearl. Pearl is in Dublin, trying to make herself die. Maria is here to stop it.
She must get to her instantly. Every step of the way is a torment: passport, customs. She wants to scream, Don’t you know that this is an emergency! Why hasn’t someone from the embassy cleared her way? Why is no one here to help her?
She gets through customs. Walks down a hall and through a series of doors. Sees the sign, in Irish and in English: WELCOME TO DUBLIN. She was never tempted to travel to Ireland; she’d had too much to do with too many Irish priests, been irritated by their provincialism, their puritanism. Dublin in her mind was a city whose life finished in 1922, the year of Ulysses. A city in literature, in history. Her daughter, maybe, is becoming a part of history. She hears the words from The Wizard of Oz: “You’ll be history. You’ll be history. You’ll be hiss, you’ll be hiss, you’ll be history.” Munchkin voices, mad-sounding, frantic. The words wheel and circle in her brain. Then another voice, calmer: “One by one we are all becoming shades.” “The Dead,” her favorite story, from the collection named for the city she’s about to enter. That was the point, wasn’t it, that the living were turning into the dead? All right, but not her daughter. It doesn’t help to think like that. That was why she gave up that kind of reading. It won’t help her daughter now for her to have visions of souls whirling in snow. It probably isn’t even snowing.
. . .
Maria hails a taxi to the embassy. It takes her to an area that is beginning to look suburban, and she thinks the driver must be mistaken. “Are we going to the American embassy?” she asks, and he says, “We are so,” and she wonders if he resents her lack of faith. He stops the car in front of a building that is not what she imagined any embassy could be. No grandeur here, no imperial display, no suggestion of men in elegantly cut suits making decisions that could reinvent the globe. This is a building badly thought up, an ill-digested, circular misunderstanding of the modern. She has expected crowds: spectators, policemen, surrounding Pearl. But the area around the entrance is empty; there are the usual guards but no throng of onlookers. Pearl isn’t there. She runs up the shallow stairs. Should she ask the guards? What would it be, polite? “Excuse me, my daughter was chained to the flagpole here; would you happen to know what’s become of her?” Or frantic? “If my daughter is dead, you must tell me instantly.”
A gu
ard asks her business. She tells him she is here to see Caroline Wolf, the woman for whom she was told to ask. She gives her name and is told to wait.
She wants to rush at the guard and say, I cannot wait! I need to know this instant if my daughter is alive! But she sits down, sweating with the effort of inaction. Breathe in, breathe out. Hope for the best. Believe the best. Believe that she is not among the dead.
She trains her eye on the double glass doors, as if fixity of focus can make something happen. A woman in a red knit suit with brass buttons and hard-sprayed blond hair approaches.
“Ms. Meyers? Caroline Wolf.”
Another southern accent. Maria doesn’t at the moment have the impulse to overcome regional prejudices. Or to make small talk or ordinary polite exchanges.
“Where’s my daughter? Is she all right?”
“She’s been taken to the hospital. She’s in good hands. Would you like to come into my office?”
“I want to see my daughter.”
“Please come into my office. I have some information for you.”
Maria would like to scream, Just tell me which hospital. Don’t waste my time! She digs her nails into her palms, ordering herself to be obedient, something she hasn’t had to do in thirty years. Obedience was something she gave up when she left the world of the Catholic Church for the secular universe. Now it’s a skill she must reemploy. Is it something you never forget, like riding a bicycle? Walk slowly. Keep your mouth shut. Do exactly as she says.
Maria follows her into a small bare office. A minor diplomat. Where is the ambassador? Then she remembers: it’s Sunday, two days after Christmas: skeleton staff. She sees a skeleton staff. She sees a skeleton. She wills herself to stop seeing it.
“We’re very lucky in our ambassador. She’s a mom herself, you know.”