Willnot

by James Sallis

  “A guy from Earth, Mack or Rutger, some manly name, has just arrived on this world he knows nothing about to fix everything for those who live there. Witnessing what appears to be a senseless, purposeless suicide, he says ‘We do not speak ill of the dead.’

  “His guide starts to respond, stops to thump on the fritzing translator box to get it to work, then says ‘Here, we do not speak of the dead at all, else they believe you are calling them back, and return.’”

  “Missed that one.”

  He twisted in a hard spiral right, then left. “Feels like someone took a sledgehammer to my shoulder—which pales beside the screaming headache. But most of all, I’m just fucking thirsty.”

  I poured water for him, told him to take it slow.

  “In combat, you get hit, you go down. Wait to see what’s coming next. Same thing.” He drank the full cup. “There wasn’t a second shot. Everything still works. And here I am talking to you. Fully confident that the local cop stationed outside my door is there only to protect me from further harm.”

  “State police, actually.”

  “Let me guess. Per request of our buoyant friend from the FBI.”

  “Buoyant?”

  “She keeps bouncing up.”

  “Get some rest, we’ll talk later. Pain meds are ordered.”

  “Won’t need them.”

  “You can refuse.”

  “That’s how I got here in the first place, refusing.”

  I waited but he added no more.

  “Doc?”

  I turned back at the door.

  “No worries. That shot? Just an old friend’s way of saying hello.”

  Head down, eyes up: a classic gleek from Maryanne as I came in the door. “Two walked, two waiting, one pledged to come back later.”

  Not a bad tally, considering.

  “I thought about holding his driver’s license, tell him he could redeem it when he returned.”

  “Are we that desperate?”

  “Not yet. Freda Malone’s in your office.”

  “Is Michael—”

  “With her.”

  And his head was already turning toward my voice when I walked in. Freda held him up.

  “See how much weight he’s put on!”

  Michael had become my occasional patient at age eleven months, having begun life four months early at just over a pound. Now he was three. He’d spent five months in the NICU at University Hospital and still went there for major problems or checkups; between times, he came to see me. See being a metaphor only, since he’d lost his eyesight to oxygen toxicity. But he knew my voice, always turned toward me when he heard it.

  I said hello to Freda and asked if Michael was all right. She said again “See how much weight he’s put on!” and started crying. I sat down in the chair by her and took the boy.

  “He’s fine,” she sputtered.

  “And you’re not.”

  She held her breath a moment to still the tears. “Michael’s daddy, he left us, been two weeks ago Tuesday.”

  Michael’s daddy. Not Preston, or Pres.

  It’s something you see a lot with chronically ill children. No matter how close the couple is, how devoted, the demands eat away at families. So much of the caretaker’s time and energy is spent on the child that there’s little left over for husband or wife, other kids, any pretense of a normal life. Ties wither. Affection fades. Tamped-down anger on every side.

  “What did Preston say?” I asked.

  “You know him, three words would be a speech.”

  And communication’s the first thing to go. Not that Preston was much of a talker to start with. More a nod-for-hello, grunt-to-indicate-he-was-listening kind of guy.

  “He left a bunch of money, said he’d send more.”

  “Have you talked to your social worker about this? Cathy, is it?”

  “You mean Candy up at the hospital, that’s been following Michael? No.”

  “Do. She can talk you through this. Ask her to call me if there’s anything I can help with.”

  Michael had to be among the quietest babies ever, always attentive, always reactive, but rarely emitting sounds. As though his beginnings, as he lay intubated and unable to cry or vocalize, subject to continuous pain and discomfort, had set silence indelibly at the center of his world.

  I held out a finger, he nibbled at it, I handed him back to his mother.

  “You know you can call me anytime, right?”

  “Thank you. I’m … I’m really scared. Not like before, not even all those times Michael was doing so poorly. This is different.”

  I walked Freda to the door and asked Maryanne to give me a minute before sending anyone in. I’d almost told Freda “You’ll be fine” but stopped myself. All those phrases that sprout so easily on the tongue, the dross of bad movies and hospital corridors: It will get better, It’s for the best, Everything will be okay, You’ll be fine. I had promised myself during residency to delete them from my vocabulary. Yet another promise I hadn’t kept, perhaps couldn’t keep, but I hung close.

  It wouldn’t get better for Freda, or would do so by tiny, invisible increments. She would never be fine. She would never see fine, never so much as catch sight of it on a hilltop far away, beckoning.

  13

  “The assignment was to write about where you live, at least three pages. The idea being, what we talked about in class before, that most of us are forever looking off into the distance, don’t see the world around us. Nathan turned in twenty-three pages. With a note apologizing and saying he knew how busy I was and I didn’t have to read all of it.”

  “This is the ant-farm kid, right?”

  “Ant mill. But yes.”

  Richard was in his homeboy clothes, baggy tan pants, unbuttoned plaid shirt over a T-shirt the legend of which had long faded away but which I knew to be WONDER DOG. Dressed for school he’d be in pressed slacks, shirt and tie. Here at home he looked as if he might be on his way to a grunge-band rehearsal.

  “He went back to America’s beginnings, to the utopian communities: Oneida, New Harmony, Brook Farm. All those struggles to create one small part of the world that was better. By example, by exemption. Nathan suggests that there’s something there, something in our blood as Americans, that we never got away from. Then he moves closer on the timeline. Listen.

  “‘My grandfather says how during World War II everybody thought what they were doing would change the world for good, that when it was over they would come up for air into this peaceful, fair and free society. But that instead, things went back to how they were before. Women who had worked hard jobs in factories and held everything together got hustled back to their kitchens. All the ideals that had seen soldiers and civilians through it got pushed aside, forgotten. The new goal: produce, own, produce more, own more. Consume.’

  “Then he flashes forward to the sixties. How the peace movement, the youth movement, thought they’d change the world with their music, their freedom, their new communalism. And he quotes a contemporary Marxist historian: ‘America did again what it always does. It absorbed the discord, turned it soft; bottled the rebellion and poured in water till it was potable, till it was safe.’

  “The world could never be like that, of course, the way communalists envisioned. Nathan knows it. But he keeps asking why we still carry that image in our minds. And all the time he really is writing about where he lives, about Willnot.”

  “The way it started, at least.”

  “There’s still a lot of smoke from that old fire.”

  “And lost causes never really are—someone always finds them again?”

  Richard picked up a handful of papers from beside the computer, held them toward me as though, having heard the abridged version, I’d now have no choice but to read it in full.

  “He turned this in on paper?” I said. “All twenty-three pages?”

  “I printed it out. So it wouldn’t get wiped once the semester’s over. It’s old hat to us, Lamar. But not fo
r a twelve-year-old. Think about it. His sense of history, of how events aren’t isolated. The connections he makes. What made this kid think his way through all this in the first place? Twelve years old and he’s asking questions like this, seeing things so differently? What’s going to happen to him? How’s he going to survive?”

  “We did.”

  Richard looked toward the doorway, where Dickens sat licking his lips. “We did, didn’t we? And so did Dickens, who really, really needs food now.”

  I followed them out to the kitchen, fetching a small can from the pantry and handing it over.

  “I went with my father once to see Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm at their house in Milford,” I said. “A long bus ride from Port Authority, and you asked the driver to let you out just outside town, at the foot of a hill. Up above was this looming structure that looked like where the Addams Family could have lived. Damon had a welcome mat that said GO AWAY. Immediately upon returning home I copied that, lettering and all, as a sign for the door to my bedroom.”

  Richard laughed. “I’d have had no need for it, having spent my childhood alone in my room.”

  He spooned savory food, beef and gravy smells, into the red bowl that had been his as an infant and now belonged to Dickens.

  “I had parent-teacher conferences today, probably why I’m thinking so hard about Nathan. So much came back to me. How my own parents had no friends, least of all one another. How when they rarely spoke it was ‘What’s for dinner?’ or about things that had happened long in their past. There was nothing left, nothing between them, but ritual.”

  Putting the bowl down, he said, “In my dreams I’m still always alone.”

  I went to him. “But not here.”

  “No, not here.”

  Dickens looked up briefly and went back to eating.

  “Lamar.”

  I sat up. “What?”

  Dickens crouched at the end of the bed, eyes huge, ears flattened.

  “You’ve been dreaming. And for two or three minutes shouting in what sounded like Polish or Russian.”

  “Saying what?”

  “You missed the part where I said it wasn’t English? Some kind of negotiation, from the sound of it. Trying to convince someone of something. Or reason with them.”

  I lay back. The pillow was soaked with sweat, and cold. Dickens said “Prrrup?”

  Random images swirled back into my mind, sensations, bits of connective tissue. It hadn’t been a dream, but a habitation. A visitor.

  Pale green light somewhere across the room. Damp-animal smell of a humidifier whose filter badly needed changing. A hand on my arm, and when I looked down it was like a catcher’s mitt holding a stick. Not much left of me.

  Something I had to do.

  “Ruby Jo …” Where the fuck had we got that name? Ruby Josephine. What a load to drop on a little girl’s shoulders.

  “I’m here, Dad.”

  And here was …? Right. Back at the old house. I remembered watching Compton Street roll by the van’s windows, where you’d never know sixty years had passed, then brighter lights as we hit downtown, which you’d still miss if you blinked. The house had seen dozens of souls since, the town had known hundreds, but both felt like an old sweater you found in the back of the closet. When you tried it on, it still fit.

  We’d talked a lot about our heritage back then, about keeping things in perspective, opting out of bigger, better, faster. About how the country started, or how we believed it had. Benny’d been so fond of the word should that we finally had to make him stop using it. Fined him $10 every time it came up. Benny’s money in our pockets, stars in our eyes, and not much else. What did we know? We were kids. Belief, though—that was the other thing we had. Poor sons of bitches.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  You sure can, Sweetheart. And it’s a long list, ’cause that’s where everything I had has gone, it’s all on that list. You can get me being able to swing my wasted legs out of this bed and walk. Get me being able to eat real food. Not have to pee every thirty minutes or wear these fucking diapers. You can get me being able to do what I have to do.

  “Dad, it doesn’t matter. Not after all these years.”

  She isn’t a little girl any longer, of course. I look up, there’s this old woman sitting there. My girl, my Jo still, but an old woman. Seems wrong.

  Like so much else.

  “No one remembers. No one cares, or thinks about it. We’ve talked about this, Dad.”

  And we have, again and again. Yet here, spitting in the face of all good sense or practicality and against your every protest, we are. Here in the old house. Here in the town that was going to repave one of the world’s streets, reinvent virtue, save the few from the many.

  Like all those end-of-the-world stories, spaceships loaded with travelers off to begin civilization afresh elsewhere, Benny would say. Did say. Till we had to start fining him for that too.

  No one meant anything by it at first, I can’t even remember how it got started. Someone saying You know … , somebody else coming in with And the thing is … Then before you know it we’re all spinning out, trying to top one another, it’s become this super-weird cutting session, the world according to could-be.

  Richard’s hand was on my chest. “You went back to sleep.”

  “I …”

  He waited. Dickens thwapped my leg with his tail. “Anything I can do?”

  “You’re here.”

  “So it would seem.”

  Moonlight lay lazily on the floor, depthless as clouds moved into place, bright and brimming as they passed.

  “Then I’m good.”

  Dickens arched his back and threw up. Too much schmaltz, obviously.

  14

  “And this is what?”

  “Norm Posner’s stool sample.”

  “In a PEZ container.”

  “Not to worry, he says, it’s been boiled.”

  “And duct-taped shut.” The tape cut in half lengthwise, with dull scissors, probably; six or seven fibers jutted whiskerlike from the cut. “We didn’t give him a specimen jar?”

  “Says Dolly used it for something else.”

  I made a collection note in Norm’s file on the computer. “Will the lab accept it like this?”

  “We can try. Maybe they’ll be having a slow day. I’ll mark it urgent, see if that helps.”

  Eight years of study and here I am staring at shit in a candy tube. Wouldn’t take much force to bend that into a metaphor. “Alimentary, my dear,” Richard said when I told him about it.

  Maryanne was back in the door almost before she left.

  “They need you in OR. Vinny says Dr. Mawby’s about to kill someone.”

  Vinny, a self-taught accountant with no medical background whatsoever but a ferretlike nose for finances, had been acting administrator for seven or eight years. He’d been appointed pro tem after the death of old Doc Storm, and consonant with Willnot’s general notion that going with things as they are is better than messing with them, Vinny just never got up out of the chair.

  Jules Mawby, on the other hand, was Chet Wilde’s dark twin. Chet had retired but couldn’t stay away from patients and kept visiting ER; Mawby no longer had any business being near a patient but wouldn’t pack it in. Granted, that was all he had. Years back, on the way home from a trip to Disneyland, his wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren had died in a car accident. Six people tired, laughing, gone. We’d seen the shakes move into his hands, the unsteadiness as he made his way down the halls, the times he’d step away somewhere inside himself, still and unresponsive, then dial back in.

  I found him drinking coffee in the nurses’ lounge. He always preferred it to the larger doctors’ lounge, said it had a warmth and sense of comfort ours lacked. I poured a cup for myself and sat beside him. I could smell the mouthwash and the odor of his body, metabolism transfigured by alcohol.

  “Vincent told me you were coming,” he said.

  “I guess you
know why.”

  He nodded. “Been a while since we saw one another, Lamar. How’s Richard?”

  “He’s good.”

  We sat listening to food carts grumble off elevators out in the hall. Two nurses came in talking quietly and, seeing us, withdrew.

  “This can’t go on, Jules. You know that.”

  “I know.” He finished his coffee in two swallows. “You’re catching this one for me?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Nothing to it. Simple nip-and-tuck.”

  An inguinal hernia that had, as they sometimes do, gone ambitious.

  He washed his cup at the sink, rinsed, washed again, and hung it back on the pegboard.

  “I do know, Lamar,” he said.

  Six days later a neighbor went over and, getting no response, called the police. Water for a recently planted Chinese elm had been left on, turned the backyard into a pond. Jules Mawby lay atop a freshly made bed in his own pond of piss, vomit and feces, bottles of Seconal, Darvon and oxazepam like sentinels at bedside. Lined in a precise row on the kitchen counter were bottles of bourbon and Scotch; apparently he’d poured the contents down the sink.

  We should have got help for him. We should have stopped him, not let him go on practicing, not covered for him. Someone should have befriended the man. I should have checked on him.

  Shoulds will take you off at the knees.

  In my dream, people have begun wearing their bones outside their skin. I’m interviewing them to try to understand how they do this, how they learned.

  First you have to step away from knowing it’s not possible, one adept tells me.

  Then with the next foot you step outside your self, another says.

  The second adept looks suspiciously like Richard.