On the way home, after we’d rescued the mutt from eating his own weight in dried cow, Mona huffed and puffed about Harry. She was real sore. And she moaned about how dumb you had to be not to believe the world’s climate was sorely screwed.
But then she said, ‘But I’m the god-danged nut’ and when I asked her for why, she said because every time she went to Harry’s place, which was not often, she fell for it and got sucked into some dumb argument. Like the one about climate change.
‘Half the world knows about climate change, and don’t need convincing. And the other half of the world don’t believe in it, and it seems like nothing you can say or do or show ’em will change their minds.’
‘But people must be changing, somewhere, mustn’t they,’ I said, because once upon a time hardly no one believed in it, and now plenty did.
And Mona said that was down to young people, people like me and Bly, thank God. And she actually said ‘thank God’ though I might not have told you that I never met a bigger atheist than Mona.
‘You young folks. You ain’t so stupid. It’s as you get older that you get stupider. That’s how it seems to me. That’s why you gotta keep on learning. You got keep from being untelligent.’
So then we laughed and then Mona said, ‘You know what Harry’s problem is?’ and I said ‘she’s a regular piece of work?’ and Mona said ‘no, well yeah, but no.’
Then she said how Harry’s problem was that she was scared.
‘Why doesn’t she wanna believe in climate change? Because she’s scared.’
And I thought about that. I thought about that not just for a while, but for a good few weeks, I believe. But right there in the car, I said, ‘Yeah, maybe, but that don’t excuse her for being a racist, does it?’
And Mona said, no, it didn’t but maybe it showed where the answers were.
So by now I had precisely no idea what she was talking about and I told her so.
And she said, ‘Look. Climate change is terrifying, right, if you stop to think about it. And part of the problem is us. Like, we know how scary and real it’s gonna be.’
‘I guess,’ I said. ‘But what do you do?’
‘You gotta do two things. Yeh, you have to tell people how scary and real it is. But at the same time you gotta give them some hope. You gotta give them some serious practical things they can do and support and believe in, while there’s still time to do something about it.’
And I thought that sounded good in theory, but what could you actually do for real?
‘Well, here’s one thing,’ she said. ‘I was reading the paper the other day, and it said that as a matter of god-dang fact, we know who’s to blame for climate change. Some smart-ass has actually done the sums. Turns out that just one hundred companies are responsible for two-thirds of the total emissions of carbon in all of history.’
So I said, yeah, but what use was it knowing, and Mona said the use in knowing was that you could take ’em to court. And sue ’em. And, yes, people were already doing that, and if they won, that might start to change things. And she had already explained the power of grabbing a capitalist by his bank balance.
‘Just one hundred companies. That’s not unknowable. You can tell who these people are and make ’em pay.’
‘But what’s the use of making ’em pay,’ I said. ‘That don’t bring the planet back.’
‘No, it don’t, but it stops ’em doing what they’ve been doing and it might still be enough to save our necks.’
We was home. And Cooper went away to sleep it off, while Mona made some tea.
‘Soon be Christmas,’ she said, ‘and now you’ve met everyone, for better or worse.’
And I told her for better. Even counting Harry, it was still for better.
I was tired after our trip, and Mona said I could nap on her couch, save me going out to the cold, for the days were not so warm now. As I took my tea, I said, ‘Wait, you said I met everyone, but there’s still one more,’ and Mona looked kinda confused and asked me ‘who?’
I told her that Bly had told me about the guy who lived real far out. In the deep. The guy who Bly had told me was the first canary.
So Mona said huh, yeah. There’s him. The very final guy I hadn’t yet met. And there was something funny about the way she said that, so I said what’s the deal?
‘No deal, Snowflake,’ she said. ‘We don’t see much of him anymore, that’s all. He’s waaay out. His name’s Polleux. The Great and Terrible.’
And I said what? and Mona said nothing, ignore me, and I could see she was joking about something though I did not know what.
‘John Polleux,’ she said. ‘That’s him.’
It was the first time I heard that name, and at the time I thought no more about it. Those days were ahead of me still, but they were coming fast.
Q
Quis me liberabit de corpore
mortis huius?
I was looking in a book at Mona’s place. This was a few days before Christmas. It was a kinda different book from every other one she had in her library. Every other book in there was either a book about being sick and how to get well, or a storybook. And all those kinds of books were full of words, and they weren’t so handsome. But there was this one book that was different. It was large and square and it was full of photographs and there were hardly any words in it, and it was beautiful.
It took me a while to figure out what the book was. The photos was mostly of people, though there was some that was just buildings or the empty countryside. But the ones of people were strange. The second picture in was of a woman, least I think it was a woman but it could have been a man, set in a car. She had hair cropped short, and she was set in this beat-up old Nissan, yellow like Mona’s Suzuki, but covered in rust and dust. And she, if I was right about that but I guess it don’t matter, she was setting in the car with a telephone in her hands. She was wearing white rubber gloves and she was holding the telephone a little way away from her head and then I saw there was a white cable, the phone line, sneaking out of the car door and off somewhere, into some house I guess. And she had this look on her face. This look that I can’t describe, less I say she looked terrified. That’s all I can say. And I flicked on through the book and there was all kinds of folks, and after a minute I realized that more’n one of ’em looked sick and then there was a picture of Finch in there and I knew for sure what I was looking at. It was a book of pictures of canaries, though not just from Snowflake but from all across the great nation.
Later, I asked Mona about the book and she said how a photographer had come by a few years back and made the book. She took it from me and showed the pages where there was pictures of Detlef and of Mary too.
It was funny looking at pictures of people you knew in a book. They looked the same, but somehow they looked different too, ’cept I can’t tell you how. Maybe it’s because people don’t move in pictures, they don’t talk. You just see a single moment, frozen. And that’s not what people are. People are moving and speaking things. And there’s something that ain’t real about a photograph. Something that’s a mite disturbing, maybe, though don’t ask me how.
‘Listen, Snowflake,’ Mona said to me. ‘We got to get you better.’
‘Better?’ I said. ‘You mean well?’
‘I mean better,’ she said, and that was when I realized what a stupid word better is. See, what does it really mean? Does it mean better as in not so sick, or does it mean better as in not sick at all?
Then she started telling me I oughta take some things to help me recover. Now, this wasn’t the first time we had had this conversation. And she wasn’t the only one I had had it with. Most everyone in the Forties had some advice for me. Do this, don’t do that. Take this, don’t eat that. Mary had told me she could write out a list of vitamins and minerals I oughta take to help with being fatigued. Even Harry had offered to look at my blood under her microscope because she could see if there was Lyme in there, or Bartonella. And I said, you can do that? Not be
cause I didn’t believe her, but because I didn’t know you could do that sort of thing yourself.
And she said, ‘Blood under a microscope is blood under a microscope’ and how you didn’t need a white coat and a certificate to tell you what to look for. You just had to learn it someplace, like from a book or the Internet. I didn’t know if that was true, but Mona said that when you got sick with something like MCS, you had to learn to be your own doctor, because the normal doctors a) didn’t know nothing about it and b) were too busy getting bribed by Big Pharma to dole out their expensive tablets to spend any time reading about emerging illnesses.
Then Mona said, ‘“As long as men die but want to live, doctors will be derided, and well paid.” Jean de la Bruyère. 1645 to 1696. Another French fella. You gotta take matters into your own hands.’
So then, one night, when I was feeling pretty low about being tired all the damn time and having headaches for no reason, I thought that either I could go on being mad at Dr. B for doing nothing or I could be my own doctor. So I gave in.
I was wrapped up tighter’n a caterpillar in blankets and a sleeping bag and Mona had run a cable out of her house so I could plug in this little electric heater at the foot of the shed. It was just a single white metal tube and it was on real low but it was enough to keep me from freezing.
But then I put on the flashlight and went out of my sleeping shed and into the other one where I had put all Bly’s stuff. And there was all his pills and tablets and what-have-you and I grabbed a bunch of ’em and took ’em into my sleeping shed.
I didn’t know what some of ’em were, but I thought I’d just keep it simple to start with, so I took anything that said vitamin on it. Just one of each, and then I put my flashlight out and waited to wake up in the morning, cured and all.
That didn’t happen.
What did happen was that fifteen minutes later, I suddenly felt my face get real hot. Now, I can tell you that I hadn’t felt hot for some durned time. Not sleeping in a shed at five-wait-six thousand feet up, no matter how many blankets I had.
So I said to myself, that’s kinda funny, because my cheeks were burning like when someone calls you something like Snowflake and you hate being called it. Then my elbows got hot. My elbows, and just when I was thinking it’s not really my elbows, it’s the joints at my elbows, no wait, it’s both, my knees started to burn too.
Then my chest, then my forehead was burning and itching and then my whole skin was the same, feeling like when you get sunburned, and it’s tight and hot and itching all over. Then my heart started thumping away, and ten seconds later I was banging on the back door shouting ‘Mona, I’m dying’ and making a general kind of din.
There was some fuss then while Mona said what’s going on and Cooper ran around in circles a bit and I said I took some pills and she screamed and said what!? So I said it was just some vitamins and she said what? again and I said I don’t know.
So we went to the shed and found the ones I took and she grabbed one bottle and said, ‘You took one of these?’ and I looked at it in the dark and it said Vitamin B3 and I nodded and said, ‘But it’s just a vitamin.’
Then Mona started laughing. Then she said I wonder what will happen next and I said what’s gonna happen next is I’m gonna die and she laughed some more and said, ‘Snowflake, you ain’t gonna die. What you got is the niacin flush.’
So of course I said the what? and she took me back indoors and gave me a big glass of cold water and put a wet cloth on the back of my neck and I sat there while she talked to me and told me I’d be fine and I didn’t have to worry. She said how some vitamins you could take as much as you liked, and they would do you no harm.
‘Your B12,’ she said, ‘the only way you could kill yourself with B12 is if you fell in a vat of the stuff and got drownded. But B3, that’s niacin, you gotta give niacin some respect.’
She showed me the bottle and it said Vitamin B3, 100 mg, and that meant each capsule was 100 milligrams of niacin, B3. And she said that most people only took a little bit. Like 15 or 20 or something. But some people took more, and if you was gonna take more, you had to work your way up to it, bit by bit, and give your body time to adjust. Otherwise, you got what I had right then, which was a classic case of the niacin flush.
‘So now you know how middle-aged ladies feel when they get the hot flashes,’ she said, and off she went giggling again like her feet was loose.
What happened next wasn’t so funny. I got a little mad. Well, I got more’n a little mad. I was cross and I shouted and I said some mean things because they’d all told me to start taking stuff but no one said it was dangerous and what kind of quacks were they anyway. And all Mona told me was that I was ungrateful and nothing more but she didn’t have to. I could tell she was real mad at me too.
We didn’t speak to each other for days, not really, we just hung out and got our own food by ourselves and not together and read a lot. And when folks came by it was kinda awkward. I saw people whispering what’s wrong and what-have-you and Mona shrugging and no one asked me straight out and that was good because I was kinda mad at everyone for telling me to take stuff and not telling me it could be bad if I didn’t get it right.
It went on like that for days, like we was an old married couple and not a damn kid and a fifty-what-have-you old lady, and on it went until two things changed it.
The first thing was that Christmas came.
It wasn’t the holliest-jolliest Christmas of all time, and we didn’t have presents for each other, but Detlef was throwing a big party out at his place for anyone that wanted to come and Mona asked me the morning of the party if I wanted to go and I shrugged and she said she’d like me to and anyway Cooper was coming and then I started crying and she put her arms around me and said, well, let’s go then, Snowflake.
So we did, but things still weren’t the same between us. I felt bad and tried to talk in the car on the way over to Detlef’s, but it was hard going and we was silent a lot. It was dark already and we bumped through a tiny little bit of Arizona with the headlights on Mona’s car just about making out the way. At the party, there was lots of folks there, most everyone in fact. No one gave anyone any presents. After a time, while I was setting with Mona by a wall watching folks talking and laughing, she leaned over to me and said, ‘A man is a being that can get used to anything,’ and I took a guess at Nietzsche but she said, no, it was Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and though he was better known for being a writer he was also a little bit of a philosopher, and therefore it so happened she knew his dates and they was,
‘1821 to 1881. Look at these folks. Imagine what every one of ’em been through to get to this room, this Christmas. They been through pain and sickness and fear and they’ve faced up doubt and disbelief and arguments on most every side. Yet here they are. And in the end they got used to it.’
‘I feel like we oughta have presents,’ I said to Mona. ‘You’ve been so good to me. I oughta give you something.’
But Mona, she said I didn’t have to, it wasn’t why she was helping me and if I had the chance to help someone, wouldn’t I do the same? And I thought about that and just while I was thinking about it Mona said, ‘Yeah, it’s Christmas, and we got each other,’ and I didn’t know if she meant she and me, or everyone and I guess, thinking about it, she meant both. We all had each other, the canaries, and even Jenny was there and even her boyfriend Steve and he was super nice and I liked talking to him a lot. Just like Jenny, he didn’t doubt that the canaries was sick. He was some kind of business man in San Francisco when he wasn’t standing at Jenny’s gate trying to get let in. Where Jenny smiled with her eyes all the time, Steve was kinda serious-looking. When you spoke with Steve, you had the feeling that he was worrying about something, only he never said what. When he was talking he would often reach for the back of his head, which was a shave-or-be-bald kinda deal. It was like he was checking his hair was really missing. Still, I liked him a lot.
And Cooper had a fine old time at the
party too and ran around in circles till Mona laughed and said how he was gonna sleep well that night, for sure. She dug her elbow into my ribs, gentle.
‘Just think about the journey everyone in this room took to get here tonight, to a house owned by a giant German in the middle of the Arizona desert at Christmas.’
She nodded over at Sally and Dolly and told me a thing or two that made my hair stand on end, about how at one time they was homeless for a year or more, how they lost the house they owned trying to pay for medical bills. Or Mary, who’d as of now been living out of the back of her truck for seven years. How she kept a gun under her cot after what happened to her one night when she was parked up in New Mexico. Or Finch, who’d been high-flying away at Harvard till he got MCS, on account of the vent from some lab being next to his office window, he reckoned. How his wife left him on account of she couldn’t cope with it. She told me everyone’s story, more or less, everyone’s story, and none of ’em would make you wanna sing. And she asked if it wasn’t some kind of miracle that we’d all made it this far, to Detlef’s house, that Christmas. When she’d done, she leaned in to me and said, ‘Look at ’em. We don’t need presents. Not when we can give each other something, just by being here.’
And I knew that was true and then I turned to Mona and I said, ‘Hey, you know what?’
‘What?’ she said.
And I said, ‘So Dolly finally had something to put on her calendar.’
And Mona said ‘what?’
And I said, ‘Something to look forward to.’
She looked at me.
‘You are one fascinating biped, Ash,’ she said and finally I felt she liked me again.
So that was the first thing that made things better between Mona and me. And the second thing was this: that something happened that made us forget all about ever being mad with each other. Something way more important than her and me and our little fight about a vitamin. And that was that Bly came home.
Snowflake, AZ Page 13