Willnot

by James Sallis

  “Dad lived here when he was young,” my companion said as I followed her up four stairs. Three stout men could stand side by side on the porch. The fourth would be out of luck. “Stuart Bielecki. He built it.”

  “And a lot of the town as well.”

  “Youthful folly, he always said.”

  “Youthful folly doesn’t often create things that are still standing three generations later.”

  She opened the front door, and as I stepped in, the smell of dampness, mold and rotting wood came to me.

  Pale green light somewhere across the room. Damp-animal smell of a humidifier whose filter badly needed changing. A hand on my arm—my daughter’s, Jo’s—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.

  I knew then why I was dreaming of infirmities, why so many images of death had been floating about me, why the thought of Kirillovich’s abyss had drifted back after so many years.

  I had been here before.

  “Dad’s in the bedroom, at the back,” she said.

  But I knew that.

  At the door she thought to hold back, then, revising that thought, stepped in ahead of me. She put her hand gently on his arm. “Dad, this is Dr. Hale. Your neighbor. Is it okay if he looks at you?”

  I crossed to the bed, strangely in two places at once, there on the bed, in memory at least, and here walking toward it.

  But it was more than memory. And even as in anticipation my mind ticked down the familiar checklist, breathing, heart rate, skin temp, pupils, pain response, I knew that was unnecessary.

  A tall man, a stranger, stands beside me. Dr. Hale, she says. I look up at him and try to speak. Can’t. The man nods. I know, he tells me.

  I wanted to see what had become of the town. If all of it meant anything. I guess our lives mean what we want them to, what we make of them. That’s what Daniel used to say, anyway. He was the smart one, always talking about market forces and capital, how they’d trump whatever government happened to be around. Grind it right down, he’d say. Woops, there goes democracy. There goes a kind society that takes care of its aged, its infirm. Heady stuff. And head in the clouds.

  Sometimes you just have to do things, you know?

  What’s important—that’s what you keep your eye on. What needs to be done and how to get from here to there. What you can’t get around, you remove. Committees will fill a bucket with spit but they won’t pick the damn thing up and carry it, the weight of it. And someone has to.

  If only I could believe in anything now, anything at all, the way I did back then.

  The bodies can’t be theirs, I know that. They’d be long gone. But when Jo read the news story to me, it was like the town was calling me. My past was calling me back. And I knew that coming here was the last thing I had to do.

  The tall man beside the bed bends down, his hand on my arm. Like Jo’s. So much is spilling out from within me.

  I’ll wait with you, he says.

  26

  Following weeks were the précis over which you labor, mind backpedaling to cram in whatever might be important, or the résumé that squats on the screen, cursor blinking, as you fuss over whether to include that honors program during college days. A dozen people stacked like planks into a phone booth, thirteen clowns emerging from a VW, the commercial that keeps you away from the show. As time gobbled up the hours.

  Roy went back to work half days and, as far as I could tell, stuck to our agreement that he limit himself to such. Riding the desk and phone, as he put it.

  Agent Ogden called close to midnight on a Thursday to tell me that she was returning to Richmond, leaving in minutes, in fact. Dark outside, murky future, she’d turn on the lights, drive, and see. I wished her luck.

  Nathan, mom and sister had dinner with us, for which Richard “assembled” a shepherd’s pie and broiled asparagus, and at which no one mentioned the boy’s aborted desertion as Nathan filled every chink in conversation with talk about his upcoming class at the college. He had been reading the course catalog daily, his mother said. Reminded her how as a child in a trailer park in Texas she spent hours poring over the Sears catalog. That was the real world, she’d thought then. So much fine, classy stuff, the stuff of dreams, of the good life. Though of course it wasn’t, really most of it was on the cheap, plywood and glue and glitter. Then, realizing at some level how oddly her reminiscence rang against her son’s enthusiasm, she grew silent. At which point sister Chloe told us she wanted to go to college too. When I asked Nathan if he’d seen Bobby, he paused before saying “Once.”

  Jo Bielecki closed down the Haversham place and left town, back to Tacoma where she’d lived twenty years ago, she said, after burying her father in Willnot as he’d asked. It got out who the old man was, and half the town showed up for the service. Andrew, wearing a new, well-fit dark suit and starched white shirt complete with cuff links, headed things up. A FOR SALE sign appeared briefly on the front lawn of the house, then quietly vanished. The house remained empty.

  I never discussed what happened that night, sketching out only the shape of the night’s events for Richard, who chose not to give voice to the questions alight in his eyes. For all the lives I’d dipped into, never had I felt so intimate a bond. I understood that I’d been given something immeasurably private, something of a value beyond imagination.

  Barely had we finished talking and, with dawn blushing in the windows, begun to get ready for a few hours’ sleep, when Richard called from the bedroom.

  Dickens was on the bed seizing, all four legs tonic, jaws snapping. Bladder and bowels had emptied. Froth and traces of vomit hung from his mouth. We sat on opposite sides of the bed touching him, waiting for the convulsions to subside.

  Over past months I’d taken note of Dickens’s increasing thirst and urination, figured in his lethargy and vomiting, and come up with feline diabetes, which Dr. Levy would soon confirm, and which with a high-fiber, high-carb diet and insulin would go into remission. Of late I’d begun to suspect tumors as well.

  I’d been reluctant to say anything to Richard but now told him my conclusion and speculation, running down the options.

  “Is there anything else we can do?” he asked.

  “What we do already. Be with him. Care.”

  The contractions had stopped, and Dickens looked blankly around—lost, or reorienting. He twisted till he got his back legs under him and tried to stand, but promptly collapsed and lay there panting. Three more tries and he made it. Wobbling, with legs still shaky, he walked to Richard and climbed into his lap.

  Time’s appetite held, and days were consumed.

  Dickens rallied and soon was himself again, logging serious rest time to re-collect energy for trips to food bowl and litter box. His new favorite place (the loci of these changed frequently—Richard called them his roosts) was the bedroom clothes hamper, and he seemed to be there whenever access was required, so that soiled clothes accumulated on the floor alongside. Through these, to attain his perch, Dickens trod disdainfully.

  For a brief period, stories flourished of dead rats, dozens of them it was said, come upon at the dump, behind the elementary school, by the town reservoir. With investigation the stories proved to derive from discovery of a single rat and a couple of field mice, bell-curving as they passed from person to person, gone by week’s end. Interestingly, during the stories’ currency we experienced, both at office and at hospital, gaggles of patients with pedestrian complaints, coughs and rashes and the like, they’d heard might be symptoms of worse disease.

  Richard arrived home from administrative meetings late one afternoon railing at budget cuts that threatened extracurriculars, band and chorus among them. “No pay raises for my teachers, either,” he says, “but you’ll be glad to hear the football and basketball teams are safe.”

  Another day I came home to find Nathan sitting outside under the Chinese elm, attention sunk fathoms deep in a copy of Theodor Adorno’s
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. He had discovered the Frankfurt School and really, really needed to talk to Richard about it.

  Not long after that, we both got hit by a blue-ribbon cold that moved in for better than a week and would not let go, groans and coughs resounding from kitchen to living room, bedroom to bath. Dove calls, Richard termed them. I took to wearing a dapper lime-green surgical mask around the office, which afforded me a middling cachet but did little else besides make the patients feel better, and I kept away from the hospital. Richard of course claimed that’s where I brought it home from in the first place. I in turn put the blame on his kids. It was an old and unfunny joke that nonetheless stayed around, like tack hanging in long-abandoned stables.

  The day came when I woke without my first thought being what will hurt most today and took a deep breath without having to bound from bed to deal with throat-ripping coughs. Residual soreness from cramps, but nothing new as I cautiously stretched. Gut still sending cease-and-desist messages from all the acetaminophen, herb tea, expectorants, juice and guaifenesin I’d doused it with. But the virus was dearly departed.

  Richard stood in the kitchen peering into an omelet pan as though it were a handheld mirror. He had on his favorite Bullwinkle pajamas, which he never wore when ill, in which case it was strictly Goodwill T-shirt and sweats. Celebratory, then.

  “So, you too?” I said.

  “Shhh. Not aloud!” He glanced around, at nothing, conspiratorily. “How’s your gut?”

  “I’m thinking a sea serpent may have taken up residence.”

  “Then a chili omelet’s just the thing. Fix you right up.”

  Richard’s chili omelet was not the only surprise that week.

  Mother had come across a huge cache of my father’s books, sixty-four of them, in a used book store so overwrought, she said, that she walked between shelves fearful that any moment they might topple and crush her, and sent the lot of them to me. These represent, I think, the bulk of his novels, tilting somewhat toward fantasy. Though the bookstore owner told Mother they’d all come from a single collector, many were signed to Walters and Bridgets and Emilys and Biggest Fans. Fully half bore a bookplate with a wizard in sparkly gown and peaked hat sitting with legs crossed on a recliner reading. The name on the bookplate, Mother said in a note, she remembered, associating it with a vague, expressionless young woman who followed them around at conventions but never spoke.

  Among the books, I read for the first time The Biographer, his story of a man who purloins people from their lives, tucks them away (where, we never learn, nor does it matter) while he takes their places and, after twenty to thirty pages, releases them back into lives dramatically changed by his actions (things they would never do) and his experiences (experiences they would never have, that remained with them upon reoccupation) during his tenure.

  The man’s name is Benito, who speaks both in voice-over and, during residencies, in the voice of the person he’s become. He writes that he is a man without properties, a man who can be anyone but is ultimately no one. “I have been doing this a thousand years, have led hundreds upon hundreds of lives. Every one was as large from inside, and as small from outside, as every other. Each man’s or woman’s life is a world. I touch down, and fly away again into the void.”

  Richard has come up and watched over my shoulder as I wrote the last few lines. “That’s one I’d like to read,” he says. “Dinner will be ready in fifteen.” I listen to him walk away, and in my mind hear his gait not as it is now that he’s made so much progress, but as it was before—still, though, that heavy fall, the brushlike sound of the other foot dragged forward, not quite parting from ground, then the lighter footfall. Cretic in Latin poetics, one short, two long. I blink back tears.

  27

  Days later, a storm moved in and claimed us, the sort that brings old pans out from cabinets to catch the water breaching roofs and sends people out to their garages to check on boats, just in case. Windows went worthless, fingers drummed away at the boxes we live in, and newscasts from the capital fed repetitive footage of cars and pickup trucks with a foot or so of windshield showing above water, like the heads and eyes of alligators. Meanwhile, offstage, armies of mosquitoes waited, dreaming of glory days to come.

  Schools shut down, and while the sheriff’s department and hospital staff were on alert, mostly people stayed home and Willnot stayed quiet. A suspected break-in at May’s Collectables proved to be the result of a door left unlocked and blown open by wind, triggering the alarm. Per custom the high school gym remained open to provide shelter.

  Midafternoon, as standing water began to drain and the sun pushed its way through spongy clouds (Willnot ever avoiding the usual—having such occur, for instance, during the storm), we had a blackout. Could be down for hours, the power company announced. The hospital was on generators and had the situation in hand, vents up and running, auxiliary lights, batteries stockpiled for IVs and pumps, Ambu bags shucked from sealed bags and handily at bedside with respiratory, nurses and aides all prepared to bag dependent patients.

  I’d sent Maryanne home and was standing at the window watching water recede, scarcely a thought in my head, adrift. I’d made coffee before the power cut out and was doing my best to drink it before it went dead cold. Light in the office reminded me of grainy old B movies, those where people’s faces are a blur and that object in the background might as easily be a refrigerator, window frame or shape-shifting monster. I heard the outer door open. Moments later she stepped to the other side of my doorway and stopped, as though it were an imperceptible barrier. I half expected her to put up a hand to confirm.

  “Dr. Hale?”

  She wore newish jeans, a fitted blouse under a gray windbreaker, a baseball cap with hair in a ponytail pulled through the back. Midthirties? She was soaked, and her shoes squished mightily as she stepped in. Surely I imagined that, first, she took a deep breath.

  “And you?”

  “Ginny Farrell. I hear you’re good with animals.”

  “Oh?”

  “From kids at the park. I spend a lot of time there. I hear them talking. Can you help me?”

  “With what, Ms. Farrell?”

  She was quiet. Had that look of running it through one’s head like a script. How to get so many connections and crossovers in the right order, down to what might make sense.

  “Here.” Against her body she cradled a small bundle wrapped in a towel, which she held out and quickly brought back. “I had three miscarriages, when I was married. I was told I wouldn’t be able to bear children. But now—”

  It was a very small bundle.

  Briefly the lights flickered on and off. We waited. That seemed to be it.

  “—now I’ve given birth. This morning. As the storm was coming in.” She walked to the desk, put the bundle on it, and started folding back the towel. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  I looked down, then back up at her. At her eyes.

  What she had, so meticulously enswathed, was a lizard the size of a chipmunk, alive but immobile with fear.

  “But I can’t keep her. I’m not married. And she needs a good home. I thought you could help find one for her.”

  I asked her to sit. She did so, rewrapping the towel and holding the bundle carefully in her lap. I said that I’d do what I could, but first we needed to get both her and the baby to the hospital to have them checked out. Went on a bit, though gently, about birth trauma, loss of blood, potential infection. She seemed to be considering it but, once I stopped talking, shook her head, saying that she had changed her mind and was going to keep the baby.

  Tucking the towel more securely in place, she stood and walked to the doorway before turning back.

  “They’ll say I’m crazy, Dr. Hale.”

  Immediately I called the sheriff’s department. Roy answered and, when he heard why I was calling, passed me on to Sam. Ginny Farrell lived out on the old feeder highway, Sam said. He’d been by there twice, domestic disputes. He’
d head right out.

  He called back within the hour. No one home, no one around. Spoke to the neighbors, who couldn’t remember seeing Ginny for some time, then returned to the house and found the back door unlocked. Looked like the lock hadn’t worked for years. Inside, everything was tip-top. Clean and orderly and no clutter anywhere, not a chair or dish or piece of clothing out of kilter. Spooky, Sam said. Like being on a movie set or in a model home, a place conjured up whole in someone’s mind but never lived in.

  He went back repeatedly over the following days. The house remained as it was. Ginny Farrell didn’t return. We never heard from or of her again.

  Why do I tell you this, and why here? Because I’ve relived that visit so many times; I’ve not been able to put it to rest. And because of what I’m about to tell you. Because it brought to mind then, and brings to mind ever more forcefully in light of subsequent events, how little we sometimes can do to help.

  28

  I’d been kept late at the hospital that day with a routine bladder tuck that step by step became anything but. Unwarranted bleeding, careening BP, a node of cancer tucked away so stealthily behind bone that it never showed on X-rays.

  I parked, caught my breath and, walking in, heard voices from the kitchen. Richard and Bobby Lowndes looked up from the table.

  “We saved you some tea,” Richard said. He got up, took the pot and a cup already set out on the counter, and poured. A thimbleful splashed into the cup. “Woops, I guess we didn’t. I can make more.”

  “This may be a Scotch evening.”

  “She okay?”

  I’d had the circulating nurse call to let Richard know about the protracted surgery.

  “Will be, yes. Bobby. Heard rumors you were still around.”