Willnot

by James Sallis

  Bobby’s head shifted suddenly as he peered out into the yard. He was silent a moment, then turned back.

  “Not that I think there’s much need to say what we talked about. Never took you to be in the amen corner for the great myth of progress.”

  “True. But I’m surprised—”

  “That I’m still around? Me no less than you. Not sure why I came, or why I didn’t leave the way I started to. Used to be so sure about things. You know, Doc …”

  Traffic sounds on the street outside, a truck or heavy SUV. Bobby listened as it passed.

  “You always think it’s going to be some huge moral decision.”

  “The twenty-minute slam.” When he shook his head, I went on, “Someone my father knew said that’s how he wrote a hundred TV shows. Whatever the character believes, by twenty minutes into the show it folds up on him. Everything he knew was wrong. And because of that, in the last five minutes his life is changed forever. Not like that, huh?”

  “Except for the change part. I knew what I was doing, the weight of it. All I wanted was to stop.” Bobby straightened. “I’d better get along.”

  On the porch he turned back to say, “I hope your boy works it out,” then stepped off into the yard and within seconds was part of the night.

  21

  My dear Lamar,

  It’s been a long time, I know, and I’m sorry. Not that I haven’t been thinking about you—ever. So much conspires to pull us away from what’s most important.

  Could it really be that a year has passed since I told you I was moving to Kentucky? Back to Joe’s cockeyed, weird and weirdly beautiful South. We’ve bought a house far outside town (the town itself is full to capacity at just over 500 souls) where, sitting outside in morning or late afternoon, it’s not difficult to imagine that we’re alone, safely tucked away from all of civilization’s gears ceaselessly grinding us down. And from memory’s doing the same.

  Fiona fares well. No question that she misses Eldon, thinks of him constantly, but it’s been months since I heard her weeping at night in her room. Robbie has recovered perhaps as much as he shall. He’s 12 now—again, hard to believe. Therapists taught us, before we moved, everything we needed to know to continue his daily regimen. He walks unaided, can see to his own needs as far as hygiene, eating, dressing and such. He does fine as long as language connects to what he can touch or see, or almost: objects, routines, time of day. Whenever talk or events list toward the abstract he simply stands there. Not looking confused, or any different at all, really. Time out, more or less. Waiting for the world to get back on track, knowing that in time it will.

  No day goes by but that I think how impossible was Fiona’s choice in ending the pregnancy, her and Eldon’s child inside her on the one hand, Robbie’s extravagant needs on the other. None of us can ever know how that feels.

  Well, you could.

  The people here before us, longtime renters, had fig trees. We’ll let them go to ruin, no doubt, but they serve to remind me of those you liked so much when you were small. What—six or seven? Back in Arkansas. You’d sit in them for hours. It was like being inside a rib cage, you said.

  Is there ever a line between regret and memory, Lamar? How do we find it?

  Robbie has Richard’s love for animals. Each afternoon at five he goes to the kitchen, gets down the bin of dog food, and puts out three bowls of it, one red, one blue, one green. A raccoon is waiting and steps up immediately, evidencing no shyness whatsoever. The last time it came there were babies following it. Other regulars include a badger Robbie calls Adger (he can’t form the b sound), a tiny yellow female cat missing most of one paw (Little One), and (as yet unnamed) a remarkably mellow skunk that tolerates and is tolerated by both Adger and Little One.

  I do still hear from some of the old crowd. They ask about you. A lot of them are going or gone, of course. Do you remember Irv Palander? He wrote that series where the stove and clocks and other household appliances are always talking to whatever the guy’s name was—correcting him when he sets the temperature wrong, doesn’t flush the toilet or wash his hands, drinks too much or stays up late. He calls every now and again. The phone will ring, it’s quiet for a moment or two, then he’ll say “Another one’s down, Clara.” And it’s Henry up in Minneapolis, or Carol in Connecticut, or Kentucky Kim. No more adventures on the ice planet, their bows and arrows and energy guns are put to rest, the dystopia’s shut down, their ships never again to kick-start.

  I guess what they say is true, at some point when you look in the mirror you see the past. I’m sitting here thinking how many years I scolded you, when you went off to college, when you were interning at Beth Israel and doing your residency, for not writing. And now it’s me who doesn’t write. A year! I will try to do better, I promise.

  Meanwhile, if you’d ever consider coming for a visit to this wonderfully godforsaken place, there’s a spare room—even if we might have to send pictures so that we’d recognize one another. I might even, given the occasion, be driven to cook.

  Love you, Lamar. Hugs for Richard.

  Mom

  22

  Time to be a responsible citizen.

  Or to claim exemption.

  Jury duty.

  I could of course, probably without challenge, plead that my presence and ministrations were essential to the community, but that would feel a cheat. And there are other physicians to handle whatever comes along.

  So I found myself Monday at 9 AM sitting behind glass in a waiting room on the second story of the courthouse two towns over with National Treasure playing on the large screen at one side of the room and a panorama of the town, such as it was, past oversize windows on the other. The woman next to me, who had earlier asked what I was reading before going on to tell me that this was her ninth jury call, for seven of which she’d been chosen, said “They have this and Sleepless in Seattle. They go back and forth.”

  The first hour was coffee and little cakey things that had been assembled back about the time the movie was opening at a theater near you. In the second hour, like good contestants we moved up a tier, escorted single file and Quietly please to room 3-B where we huddled in the hallway awaiting whatever negotiations transpired within. Finally admitted to perch on hard benches around a kind of arena, we heard bare details of the case: Following a domestic dispute that had neighbors calling 911, a woman had slammed out of the house, jumped into her car and rapidly backed down the drive, taking no notice of and crushing the skull of her four-year-old playing there. The police arrived to find her crouched over the body.

  When my turn came for the arena seat (we were now into the third hour) I went down the checklist from the board at the front of the room. Name, age, residence, how long there, married or single, profession. The defense attorney’s head came up at the last, and he asked if on a regular basis I cared for victims of domestic abuse, for the severely injured, and for the families of same. Shortly thereafter I was excused, National Treasure starting back up as I passed through the waiting room to surrender my juror badge.

  I went straightaway to the hospital. Each afternoon from two till four, swimming upstream of phone calls, lab and X-ray techs, visitors and volunteers, the nurses do their best to enforce quiet hour. Arrived at the near end of that, I trod as seemly as possible through hallways evidently designed to pick up the tiniest sound and send it racketing from wall to wall. The two patients I’d planned on seeing were asleep, so I put in time updating charts to keep Margaret in Medical Records happy, checked in at the office (where Maryanne was alone with the fish), and went home.

  There, I found, Dickens was having a busy day.

  He was carrying the body of a gecko around the house as though uncertain, having come this far, what was to come next. He’d put the tiny body down, nose it an inch or two across the floor, paw desultorily at it, then pick it up again and take it to another room where he’d repeat the sequence.

  Time to go on pause and think deep thoughts about life and de
ath? Dickens was trying to figure it out, maybe I should be doing the same. In the twenty-minute slam, this is where the look would come over my face. Ponderment. Connection. Illumination. You’d see it in my eyes, hear it in the sound track. For moments nothing would move.

  Slams aside, physicians rarely stand around thinking about death. It’s just there at our shoulder, like air, water, sadness, loss, and there’s always too much to do. We’re problem solvers, engineers. Keep the engines running. We do this because, then we do that because. Following sequences not unlike Dickens’s with the gecko.

  Yet this body being carried around by Dickens, this tiny individual being, had possessed a beauty, organization and wonder far beyond that of any painting, music, grand machine or city that humankind might create. And now, abitrarily, to no purpose whatsoever, in moments that life was gone.

  Insignificant? Yes—and a catastrophe.

  It’s because our usual concerns are so small, my father insisted, that he’d been drawn to science fiction and fantasy. Because it forces us to pull back, to look again at what we think, what we see. I first heard that when I was ten or so, in a room at a convention hotel in Cleveland, a closed party, mostly writers and high-octane fans. There was a lot of insisting going on. Someone from the group everyone called the kids, could have been Bob Silverberg, was saying here’s what we’ve come to: science fiction’s great promise of technology that was going to lead inexorably to a shining future has instead led us to the edge of destruction.

  Mr. Heinlein was there. (I could never think of him otherwise.) I’d just read Have Space Suit—Will Travel and wanted to talk to him about it. He wanted to talk about The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Years later I read that one too, recognizing in its sham constitutional convention, supposed anarchic government and secret ruling elite a distorted reflection of the world I was beginning to perceive around me.

  So there was in Mr. Heinlein’s novel that screed of a world beneath the surface, beneath appearance. And in the same breath an unquestioned belief that our resourceful, headstrong protagonist would prevail. He’d solve all problems and get society up and running again on its true course.

  Good engineer!

  I don’t recall what other stops my thoughts took as they scuffled along and, memory obsessively self-editing as it does, probably the chain above is tampered with as well, resequenced, but by the time Richard got home I was thinking about Phil Klein, dead thirty years. Feet firmly planted in the low-end original-paperback market, Belmont and the like, he was a popular writer, a shy man with a sweet, light touch to his tales of vain robots, OCD aliens resembling large hedgehogs who came to Earth to trade their worthless gold for something useful, and the singing cockroaches of Sigma-7. Then everything fell apart at once. His wife left him for an insurance salesman, his agent shut down shop, the editor on whom he most depended without explanation stopped answering his calls, he tumbled down stairs at his fifth-floor walk-up and was housebound with two broken legs, wholly dependent on neighbors and friends, helplessly in debt for medical care. When the legs healed, he hobbled to StopOver Hardware and bought two large tarps, laid them out on the floor, sat down in one of his two black suits, and shot himself in the head.

  I’d never mentioned Phil Klein to Richard, had no cause to. Nor had I thought of the man in years. But now, sketching in what I could reconstruct of the crooked path I took to get there, I told Richard the story.

  Dickens meanwhile had lost interest in his prey. Richard looked at it where it lay on the threshold, half in the living room, half in the kitchen.

  “All that from a dead gecko? But I’m relieved. You didn’t kill anyone today. I was fearful you had, to be in this morbid mood. Might a glass of wine help?”

  “I suspect it would.”

  “And my patented bright repartee to go with. Carry your mournful thoughts outside and I’ll be right there with the goods.”

  “The goods? I thought we were only having wine.”

  “Ah … feeling better already.”

  “Hope you don’t mind my dropping by like this,” Sheriff Hobbes said. Dark was sliding unobtrusively in, like a letter under the door. I’d been gearing up to get back to the hospital to see the patients I’d missed that afternoon when they were sleeping. We heard the gate and looked up.

  “Knocked and didn’t get an answer around front and both cars were here, so I came on back.”

  “There’s a doorbell,” Richard said.

  “Never much cared for them.”

  “I know, what will they think of next? And such a waste of electricity.”

  The sheriff gave him a look I imagine he dispenses liberally to the town’s teenagers each weekend. “Heard about that test of yours.”

  “One essay question,” Richard offered in response to my unspoken question. “And one word: entitlement.”

  “Also understand”—the sheriff again—“you got some hassle for it.”

  “That I did. Along with some killer essays.”

  “Emerson smiles,” I said. “What can we do for you, Roy?”

  The sheriff put his hand on the trunk of the nearest elm and pushed gently against it, did the same about a foot higher. “Healthy tree. Firm.”

  “Richard’s work. Trees or people, we’re all happy hereabouts.”

  “S’pose we are, most days.” The sheriff brushed off the other chair and sat. We looked like apartment dwellers lounging poolside, or like three old guys planted in their chairs outside the care home.

  “I spoke with the Rayburn boy, Lamar. Met up with a man out in the woods, he says. Richard brought the boy home, but he wasn’t the one out there, was he?”

  “Nathan didn’t say?”

  “Told me he promised not to.”

  “Then his promise should hold for me as well.”

  “Lot of promises floating around.”

  Dickens scratched at the patio door. Richard went to open it for him.

  “Think that man would still be out there if someone were to go looking for him?”

  “That’s two questions. Would he be there? I don’t know. Would you find him if you went looking? No.”

  Dickens had waddled out, plopped down by the sheriff’s feet, and found the smell of his boot fascinating.

  “Agreed I’d be sure to pass it along if Bobby showed up again, or if I heard anything more of him. That was a promise too. But”—He bent down and scratched Dickens’s head—“I don’t expect Agent Ogden is sitting by her phone over in Richmond waiting for my call.”

  The sheriff’s age showed as he stood to go. Legs slow to take his weight. A moment of disequilibrium once he’d hauled himself up.

  Roy had his heart attack that night around 2 AM.

  23

  It was his second, the first one three years back a practice run, this one down and dirty. He hadn’t been taking his daily aspirin, hadn’t been exercising, hadn’t been eating right—living on sandwiches and frozen dinners. I soon learned why.

  We had him stable and upstairs in ICU by the time dawn began easing up the windows. Richard called to see how it was going and brought in bagels, which we ate in the cafeteria, on his way to school. Afterward I visited my neglected patients. Roy was awake by then but only mildly responsive. I sat and chatted with him anyway, none of which he later remembered, went to the office to see patients there, nothing remarkable, mostly routine visits, then came back to the hospital late afternoon.

  Pale and jittery as is so often the case, Roy kept picking at his gown and shifting inches right, inches left, on the pillow. But his eyes were clear.

  “Guess Sam’s in the driver’s seat now,” he said. “More than he bargained for.”

  His deputy had been on duty when, shortly before losing consciousness and unable to speak, Roy dialed the station. Sam radioed for the ambulance and met them there. He and Andrew had started CPR.

  “Did what I could to get him ready. Day had to come.”

  “He’ll do fine.”

  “Let’s hope the
worst of the excitement’s over.” Over with him—or with the town? A mass grave, unidentifiable bodies, youngsters’ re-creations, shootings, strings of outsiders. Roy glanced at the monitor by his left shoulder. “Lot of numbers and squiggles.”

  “Good ones.”

  “Owe you, Lamar.”

  “I’ll have the lecture about taking care of yourself ready once you’re feeling better.”

  “No you won’t, and you damn well know it.”

  “Okay. But it’s in the script, right?” I stepped closer, put my hand on his arm. “I asked about Sue, Roy. No sign of her, Andrew says. Or of the dog. Dishes in the sink, on the coffee table in the front room. Tracked-in dirt and leaves.”

  Roy was silent. I waited.

  “She’s still in Minnesota? With her parents?”

  “Iowa. Moved there, near her sister and family. It can get to be such a damn mess between people, you know, Lamar?”

  I nodded. Oh yeah.

  “What comes up around you,” he went on, “it doesn’t look much like what you’re always hearing, how you can ‘work things out.’ You can’t, and wanting to just leaves you sitting at the table with an empty bowl.”

  I had no homilies for him, no platitudes, only an empathy and understanding best expressed wordlessly.

  Roy knew that. He felt it.

  In The Brothers Karamazov prosecutor Kirillovich calls up the same word for the place of lowliness and degradation and that of lofty ideals. Abyss. He’s employing religious imagery of course, and leaning hard on Aristotelian either-ors, but religious imagery is finally a form of figurative language, and Kirillovich is right that Dmitri’s trapped between them—as are we all. The abyss above, the abyss below. With only crawlspaces to find relief. To be about our lives.

  Though our news embargo was over and what came streaming in, damnable—“all those yummy snacks of The World As It Is,” Richard remarked—that was not what brought me to such thoughts, nor had Dickens’s gecko.