by Smiley, Jane
Beth smiled and held out her hand. “Oh!” she said. “You must be Cecelia! How lovely to meet you! I’m Beth.” Cecelia shook her hand.
In the end, they went in together, Beth holding the door for Cecelia, but then Cecelia remained at the end of the bed while Beth stationed herself where he would see her when his eyes opened.
And she was sure his eyes opened. She was watching. They opened and she could swear that he saw her, but then they closed and stayed closed. No fluttering, no struggling toward consciousness. He had seen her and was now playing possum, she thought. After another ten minutes, during which she held his hand and pretended, for Cecelia’s benefit, to be tenderly concerned, she turned to Cecelia and said, “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s go out into the waiting room for a bit.” Cecelia, teary-eyed again at the sight of the large bandage on the back of his head, nodded.
When the door closed behind them, Chairman X opened his eyes and looked around, then shook himself a little. Mimicking a light coma was hard work, especially if she had a hold of your hand. Signs of life were like electricity that could not help passing across that connection, no matter how industriously you visualized your hand as a boiled noodle, etc. He took a deep breath. His head was throbbing, the room twisted a little to the left, and he was glad the light was dim. One display on the monitor he was attached to said, “69.” That would be heartbeat. Another said, “97.9.” That would be temperature. He was fine, then.
There had been someone in the room with her, probably the eldest. While he had not wanted to talk to his daughter any more than he had wanted to talk to the Lady X, it was nice to think that she cared enough to be there, watching from the foot of the bed. Chairman X smiled.
All in all, it had been a good day’s work. He did not quite understand why he was in the hospital or what day it was—the last thing he remembered was hearing the crowd shout, “Stop the Destruction! Stop the Destruction!” Clearly something had happened after that—perhaps one of the cops had hit him over the head with the butt of his pistol?—but he savored the memories he had. Even more students—almost thirty of them—had shown up for the third dawn vigil as had shown up for the first two. Around breakfast time and then around ten a.m. he had worked the crowd, now numbering a hundred or more—firing them up, first about the virgin cloud forest in Costa Rica, then about the ozone layer, global warming, habitat destruction, declining biodiversity, overpopulation. He’d talked and talked, and they’d shouted right back at him. Years of teaching had given him the lung capacity and the improvisational skill to go on and on, spinning out information in great eloquent nets that he threw over the heads of the listeners. He drew them in. They were his.
Without thinking, he reached for the telephone and dialed an outside line. He needed to ask Joe, his graduate assistant, if the vigil was on for the next day.
OUT IN THE WAITING ROOM, Cecelia was saying, “No! They always say that, that the prisoner hung himself in despair or something like that. He was beaten!”
Beth made her voice soothing. “I know, Cecilia, they do always say that, and most of the time it is a lie, but in this case, he really did slip on the ice and hit his head on the fountain! I believe it. Joe saw it. Joe is on his side. That’s what happened.”
JOE WAS SAYING to Chairman X, “Goddamn! You mean you don’t remember jumping Dean Harstad? Shit, man! You were trying to throttle his eyeballs right out of their sockets! You kept shouting, ‘Admit it! Admit it! Admit the Green Revolution was evil! Admit cocaine is the ultimate cash crop! Admit your life is a bankrupt evil waste!’ ”
“I don’t remember anything about that,” said Chairman X. “You don’t remember rolling around in the snow? Fuck, man, I think you even bit him! You were ticked off, man!” Joe sounded full of admiration, and Chairman X found it tempting to give in to that.
“And then I fell on the ice and hit my head and was knocked out? He didn’t do this to me?”
“No, man, we pulled you off him, and some old guy was helping him over to student health, and you were just standing there, and then you were down, man!”
“Where was Gift? Did I attack him, too?”
“Shit, I don’t know. I mean, no, you didn’t attack him, and I don’t have any idea where he is.”
AT THE NURSES’ STATION, one of the nurses said to another one, “Look at that. His phone’s lit up. I thought he was supposed to be unconscious.”
CECELIA WAS SAYING, “You know, to tell the truth, I don’t always get the feeling that he does think about me too much. For a while there, he was calling me up ten times a day, but it was always to tell me the name of another species that would be threatened by the gold mine. Over Christmas, I made up my mind that too much of the energy of this whole thing came from me—”
“I know what you mean, though over the years, I’ve gotten used to that. But just by the way he told me about you, I could tell you were something special. It wasn’t just looks, either—”
“The thing is, he thinks I’m from Costa Rica, but I’m from L.A. My father is Mexican. The link to Costa Rica is fairly tenuous, actually, but he can’t seem to get over it. One thing I would do”—Cecelia eyed Beth, amazed that she was about to make this confidence, but really Beth had a certain way about her, and Cecelia had bottled all of this up for so long—“when he would press me for stories about Costa Rica, I would just make them up. They were, well, lies, really.” Cecelia looked down at her hands, overcome by an actual feeling of shame. “I wanted him to keep coming over.”
“It sounds like you were very lonely.”
AFTER THE NURSE finally left, Chairman X relaxed, opened his eyes, and let himself think about what Joe had told him. He had done it! He had actually thrown himself upon that turd Harstad, wrestled him to the ground, tried to strangle the truth out of him, and he couldn’t even remember it! If he fought to get beneath his headache to his memories, as he had twice since hanging up the phone, there was nothing new there at all, only the old image of what it might, would, could, feel like with his hands around Harstad’s throat and Harstad’s water-colored eyes popping and his blue lips croaking, “I’m sorry I destroyed indigenous agricultural systems! I’m sorry I imposed monocultures on delicate and diverse ecosystems! I’m sorry I was so arrogant and so stupid at the same time! I’m sorry I treated people who were well adapted to their ecological niches like fools and knaves!” He found no image, alas, of what it DID feel like. Chairman X looked at his hands. He had heard of kinesthetic memory, but that was something you couldn’t actually revisit. If he recalled correctly, that was simply the promise that if he ever got hold of Harstad again, his muscles and ligaments would already know what to do with him.
Of course, and this unwelcome thought was entirely unredeemed, he hadn’t laid a finger on Gift. Gift, as usual, floated above what you might call the slaughter on a cloud of money. When his fists clenched themselves at this thought, Chairman X’s head hurt so much that he wished he was still unconscious.
AT THE NURSES’ STATION, one nurse said to the other, “His vitals are entirely normal, but I couldn’t get a rise out of him.”
“Maybe he just wants to be left alone. He’s awake, though. What we’ll do is, if the telephone light goes on again, one of us will just go in and surprise him while he’s talking.”
“What about them?” She gestured toward Beth and Cecelia, who were deep in conversation.
“Wife. Mistress. I’ve seen it a thousand times. I say it’ll be a lot better all around if we just let the two of them work it out between them.”
IT WAS late, almost two. The riot, Gary thought, had been terrific, a real experience for his literary alter ego, Larry. He didn’t want to write about it too quickly, though, because Mr. Monahan had always advised letting things settle, steep, ferment, lie dormant, lie fallow, germinate, etc. Still, he’d had his notebook out the whole time, writing down notes. He was especially proud of one section: “Some woman comes out in a red coat. The guy I’m standing next to says to this o
ther guy, ‘Bet you a six-pack of Molson’s that I can get this through that little window in the door there,’ the other guy says, ‘You’re on,’ and then he beaned her right on the forehead, and the two guys were just standing there saying, ‘Fuck, man! Fuck, man! Did anybody see us? Fuck, you hit her, man! Shhh! Fuck, did you mean to hit her? Nah! I meant to get it in that broken window, man, and she stepped right in the fucking way! What if she’s fuckin’ dead, man? She’s not dead! Fuck! I can’t believe it! Let’s get the fuck out of here!’ ” He had taken down the dialogue just the way Mr. Monahan had had them do it the first semester, only by now he was faster, and got it down more accurately. It was good dialogue, too, dramatic, though not, he realized, especially revealing of the idiosyncratic personalities of his characters. He would have to add that on his own.
And it wasn’t long after getting down that great piece of dialogue that he ran into Bob’s old girlfriend, Diane. Mmmm. Diane. She had on a new leather jacket, dark green, and a woolly hat that matched perfectly and these terrific black boots, and she’d been veeerrrrry friendly, possibly because of the dangerous situation they were in with the riot and all. So he kind of hung out with her, and then they went out to eat and to the movies, and then out for something else to eat, and the long and the short of it was that Gary was in love. He hadn’t gotten her back to Dubuque House until after one.
He had this terrific feeling, all jazzed up and happy. The rest of the semester to come looked entirely different now. Mmmm mmm mmmm. Of course, it wasn’t going to be all that easy with Bob around, but where there was a will there was a way. Mmmmm. Gary pulled out his chair and sat down at his computer. He pressed “Enter,” and the screensaver disappeared. Oh, he thought, ahhhhhhh. “Name of Document to Open?” read the screen. Gary poised his hands above the keys for a moment, then typed in, “DONNA.Doc.”
“Donna”
a story by Gary Olson
High above the Manhattan skyline, Donna Halvorson, chairperson of the board, Megavestments Corporation of the World, turned from her computer screen and stared out the window. It was 2:18 in the morning, and Donna could see no one else in any other office working so late. “Where did I go wrong?” said Donna to herself, her perfectly manicured hand straying over her five-thousand-dollar wool pinstripe suit jacket. “I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of, but
Part Five
61
Downsizing
WHEN PEOPLE at the conference saw Margaret’s university affiliation on her identification badge, they all said, “Oh! I saw that on the news! Didn’t you have a—”
“Wasn’t that amazing?” purred Margaret. “Campus unrest at this time of the year?” That was all she felt like saying about it. Back home, the program-cutting scissors that had been snipping and trimming here and there had suddenly turned into a circular saw and all departments, from the grandest spruces over in the Biotechnology buildings to the narrowest willows in Speech and Theater Arts were at that very moment being fed to it like so many logs. Margaret found herself waiting for someone, maybe anyone at the conference in a higher-level administrative capacity to remark, “You must be looking for another position. As a matter of fact, at our university—” (Yale, Berkeley, Margaret fantasized, or, in another mood, the University of Hawaii, or of the Virgin Islands). Surely she could jump, maybe she could jump, couldn’t she of all people jump—Ah, but here, halfway between Sea World and the Magic Kingdom, every detail of home and job slipped farther away by the minute.
As a precaution in case her plane went down, Margaret had graded and turned back all tests and exams and brought up to date all attendance sheets and records of in-class work, as well as rereading her will. She had made a special trip to the benefits office to include her new nephew, aged nine months, on the list of beneficiaries of her university life insurance policy. That was the old her, the Margaret she had thought of as her authentic self.
Since coming here, though, she had deconstructed, and gladly. The Margaret who would have looked around the lobby, her room, the rest of the grounds, and said, “So this is what they’ve been keeping from us,” had vanished and the new Margaret looked around and said, “I want this.” No, that was wrong, too. She didn’t say anything at all. The desire was in her flesh. Her mind was in the backseat and the car was driving itself.
It started when she opened her eyes on the peachy pink and succulent green color scheme of her room that said to her, “Lie back, roll over, slip more deeply between the smooth sheets, your breakfast will be here soon!” Did she turn on “Morning Edition”? The radio was at her fingertips. Or even the “Today” show? The TV remote was already in her hand. No! She turned on the hotel’s very own weather channel, which featured panoramic shots of the grounds and a soothing voice predicting light breezes, “temps” between seventy-five and eighty, and plenty of sunshine, interspersed with clips of blizzards elsewhere and a gravelly, despairing male voice saying, “Another large storm is tracking through the midsection of the country, dropping freezing rain and snow over a wide area.” After watching the weather channel as if spellbound for the hour that it took her to spoon half a perfect melon into her mouth with a few bites of croissant, chased by a tall glass of orange juice, she got up and put on her swimsuit, feeling just enough ambition to go to the pool. Her room had a view of the pool. Fourteen stories below her private balcony, it drew her dreamy gaze, a hex-cut aquamarine, a jewel that you could enter. When she looked down at the other swimmers, she saw the surface of the stone close magically over them, smooth, mysterious, and inviting.
After all these years (her little bitty passenger intellect laughed nervously at this), she felt at last like the princess, a role her “authentic self” would have disdained, but here she was, possessed of the magic power, partaking of the magic food. That there were many other princes and princesses at the conference made no difference, in fact soothed her. Twenty laps in the jewel the first day, thirty laps the second, then she stopped counting. The conference didn’t start till two in the afternoon, then it lasted only two hours before they broke for cocktails and dinner. The evening presentation went on for only an hour.
She had been taken by surprise; it seemed that she couldn’t resist this inexorable and exquisitely pleasurable extraction of her “authentic self.” On the third day, she went into the hotel dress shop and bought a silk cocktail dress for five hundred dollars. It featured the same colors as her room, and it slid over her body like the water in the pool, only catching deliciously at her shoulders and clinging there. The skirt seemed to float on its own gentle breeze. She put it on her MasterCard, the one she kept only for emergencies and almost never actually used. At the cocktail party that night, she saw Cates looking at her across the twilit patio as if he didn’t realize who she was and hadn’t seen her at hundreds of committee meetings over the years.
That evening she sat up late, no makeup and no stockings and no shoes, but unable just yet to take off her new dress, and she read the paper she was to present the next afternoon. She was sitting on the bed, and she could see herself in the mirror beside the TV, the dress glowing, her skin burnished in the single circle of golden light shed by her reading lamp. Looks-wise, she was ordinarily a girl who did her best and settled for that, but tonight she ravished herself. And the paper wasn’t bad, either.
It was therefore all the more surprising when, the next morning, she was informed by the manager that due to a sudden notification by the corporate sponsor of the conference, something called Horizontal Technologies, the rest of the conference was being cancelled and, unfortunately, the management of the resort would have to ask the guests to guarantee room and restaurant charges that they had already incurred. With a coercive and challenging smile, the young woman (ten years younger than Margaret at least) ripped her bill out of the computer printer and flourished it in her direction. At the bottom of the page, right by the words “total charges,” her glance picked out the number 3,198.24 the way a frog picks a mosquito from the air. Then Mar
garet saw her own hand lifting to meet the page and felt her own mouth smiling. A good, good, good girl, she said, “Oh. Thank you.”
“Will there be any problem with that, Professor?”
“Oh,” said Margaret, grinning madly. “Of course not.”
THE KNOCK at the door of Dr. Dean Jellinek’s lab was almost inaudible. If he hadn’t been alone in there, working at his computer (which, because of its state-of-the-art engineering, was almost silent), he might not have answered the door, might not have been surprised at the sight of three men, one of them small and owlishly bespectacled, in the sort of outmoded brown suit and cowboy boots that executives of agricultural companies favored, the other two brawny, in slacks and big jackets. One of these was pushing a dolly. “Yes?” he said, carefully measuring into his tone his busyness, his general importance around the university as the recipient of a large grant, and his kindly willingness to be helpful.
The little man, whose voice he instantly recognized as that of his phone buddy and teammate Samuels, of Western Egg and Milk, said to the two others, “There’s the computer. That must be a box of backup disks beside it. Take those, too. And the printer.” He stepped past Dean and looked around the lab. “The rest of it seems to be university property. Okay.” And the two larger men bore down upon the treasure-house of Dean’s intellectual life, plucked its cord out of the wall, and in two minutes were out the door with the equipment on the dolly, heading toward the elevator.