Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  So I thought go meet Dr. B and then come back and tell me that, but Stephanie was going along.

  ‘And because I want to compare like with like, I’m writing about diseases that weren’t understood in the Middle Ages, or even a hundred years ago. So in the Middle Ages, that’s basically everything. And a hundred years ago or so, that’s still a lot of things, like tuberculosis, or epilepsy, for example. And so I needed a modern illness that’s not understood and I heard about MCS, and here I am. I want to interview everyone, if I can.’

  And I said ‘even Socrates?’ and I made her laugh with that. By this point I was really liking Stephanie Krokowski. She was interesting and there was this gentle sound to her voice that made me feel good. I coulda listened to her all day. Longer.

  ‘Now,’ she was saying, ‘there was a time when people thought that the spirituality of Man was based in illness. To put it simply, the more ill a person was, the more human he or she was. The more dignified and noble.’

  I said nothing to that because Stephanie had got my mind in a whirl. But I had no time for that whirl, because there was more. She said how some people had argued that it was these sick people who thought more and did more and achieved more than the healthy ones. And that sounded wrong to me, because how can you achieve anything much set in a red plastic chair all day?

  ‘In this view, there were people,’ Stephanie said, ‘who entered the worlds of illness, and madness, and they did so willingly, and they came back with knowledge. Knowledge that was of benefit to all. That was how progress was made. Through sickness. Because what do you learn from health?’

  And then I started to understand. What do you learn from health? Nothing, that’s what you learn. You stay in your smug little world where you can stand for more’n three minutes and never even have to think about it. But make a body sick and, boy, does life get interesting quick. And when I say interesting, I do mean it. Though I also mean it’s a real pain in the ass.

  Mona showed up then.

  She wandered down the desert from her house to my cabin and to start with she was a little edgy and said perhaps Stephanie could park her car a little farther downwind because it smelled of the flatlands and had Stephanie followed the instructions about visiting? And these instructions were that she’d washed herself and her clothes for a week in nothing but bicarbonate of soda and only when Stephanie promised she had, and then changed into some clothes Mona found her anyway, did Mona settle down.

  Stephanie stayed two days, on my old porch as a matter of fact, and she met most of the gang and she made us all complete these questionnaires about all sorts of things like mental health and physical health and what-have-you and then, if we agreed, we each spat in a little plastic tube, and she had one for everyone, and she said she was gonna ‘sequence our DNA’ and see if that had anything to say about anything. So of course Mona told her that what that would say was that she was 2.8 percent Neanderthal, and I was excited because ever since Mona had done it I’d wanted to, but I never had close to that spare $99.

  Just before Stephanie left I was set with her on Mona’s porch and I suddenly had this awful feeling like I did not want her to go. She had been fun and hadn’t said anything rude about MCS and everyone liked her and felt relaxed and Mona even said she thought her PhD was real interesting stuff. So I was finding anything I could think of to stop her from getting in her car and driving back north, and one thing I asked her finally was what I had been wanting to ask her.

  ‘Do you know anything about in-groups and out-groups?’ I said, and she said, well a little, but there was a professor in her department who was an expert. Wrote about it all the time.

  So I had her tell me everything she knew and then I wrote down the professor’s name so I could see if I could read some of his work.

  ‘Did you go to a university, Ash?’ she asked then and I said, ‘No, but that don’t make me stupid. Does it? Necessarily?’

  She looked real upset and said, ‘No, no, I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. What I meant was it’s, well… I mean, most people don’t bother finding out about stuff. And you read and read and read and I think it’s really cool.’

  So I shrugged and said, ‘That’s what being sick does for you, right? Like the folks in your research used to think? Anyway, I have good teachers,’ I said. And I told her about Finch and his news line and Mona’s what-did-we-learn-today time and how I was desperate to find something to tell ’em they’d never heard of, and how I hadn’t yet managed it.

  She thought for a while and then she said, ‘You know what you were asking me? About tribes? You’re either in the tribe or out of it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So yeah, it seems we are born with the nature to be both selfish and to be kind. And this tribal stuff is pretty hard-wired too. So that seems depressing. No chance of the human race ever all getting along if we all belong to some tribe or other, right?’

  And I shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, I guess that’s pretty depressing,’ but Stephanie smiled and said, ‘Well, there are smart things we could do. Next time you’re at the library, see if they can get you something about the Great League of Peace and Power. You got that?’

  And I wrote that down next to the name of the professor, ready for my next trip to the library.

  Then Stephanie started making those I-better-hit-the-road noises and got up and I was desperate to find some other reason to have her stay so I said, ‘You can’t go’ and she said why and I said, ‘Because you ain’t interviewed Socrates yet.’

  She smiled and said, ‘Well, I don’t really have the time. But I’ll tell you one thing for free: I think that goat has borderline personality disorder.’

  Then she left and I watched her go.

  ‘I liked that kid,’ Mona said. ‘She was smart. Not untelligent at all. In fact, she was real un-untelligent.’

  That afternoon we rode out to the library and they had a book about the Great League of Peace and Power, and when I read that it turned out to be about a thing called the Iroquois Confederacy which was how some real un-untelligent guy called Deganawida worked out a system that brought peace to the Six Nations of Iroquois people, back in the day. He knew how people stuck to their in-groups and out-groups, so what he devised was a system where you belonged to more than one group. So maybe for your Nation, you was a Mohawk or a Seneca, but then you would also be in a clan, like a Bear or a Hawk or whatever. The clever part was that these two sets of groups intercut, and since you ended up being loyal to your Nation and your clan, it stopped anyone fighting with anyone, because how could you go to war with another Nation when a bunch of ’em would be in your clan too? And vice versa and so on. It worked just fine until the American Revolution came along and they were all forced to choose between the Brits or the Americans and that was the end of the Great League of Peace.

  Still, somebody showed how you could turn something negative into a force for good. Just like the selfish little gene that invented kindness.

  Later on, I asked Mona if she knew what borderline personality disorder was and her eyebrows raised up and then she asked why so I told her because Stephanie Krokowski thinks Socrates has it.

  Mona looked cross for a split second and then she burst out laughing.

  ‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said and then she explained that borderline personality disorder folks were people who, amongst other things, were real, real sensitive and easily hurt by the world and who had a bad temper that could switch in at any time they got scared by something.

  So I laughed and said, ‘Yeah, that sounds a little bit like our goat,’ but at the same time I was thinking, yeah, and it sounds like a lot of other folks too. Don’t it?

  T

  Time

  Turned out I didn’t win my game with Mona and Finch. Not with that thing Stephanie told me about the Great League. They both knew it already, though they’d forgotten the details. But at least they was happy to talk about it again when I brought it up, so I felt good about that. But I went o
n searching for something they’d never heard of and that was hard, because they was the two best-read people I ever met. And they made me realize how much they knew that I didn’t and yet they always said how they knew nothing or next to it, and then I realized just how much there is to know and how much no one will ever know. I still ain’t worked out if that’s a problem or not.

  Meanwhile, time did its trick of standing still and hurrying right along at the same time. And it did both those things twice as fast (or maybe I mean slow?) as before, because after Stephanie left there was a long time in which nothing happened next, ’less you count me feeling sorry for myself and time passing as something and I surely don’t.

  Four to six weeks later, for example, happened about the only thing I remember happening. Stephanie had been as good as her word and had our spit tested, which was good of her because if you had gone and done it yourself you had to pay that ninety-nine dollars. So, just like Mona, we all found out where we came from and who our ancestors was, and how much Neanderthal we was too. Mona made everyone come over to hers for a gene-discovery party, because Stephanie had sent the results to her to save mailing everyone.

  So then, person by person she made everyone open their envelope. First funny thing was that it turned out that Detlef had 12 percent Spaniard in him and for some reason that made Harry bust out laughing. Though Detlef didn’t seem to mind. He thought it was cool. Then we opened Harry’s and boy, was she in for a shock. Turned out she had one and one half percent ‘West African’ in her, and then she looked way confused and was quiet for some noteworthy period of time. We all nudged each other and winked and tried not to make too much fuss when she said, ‘Well, I’m feeling a bit beat today, guess I’ll go home.’

  And after she went no one had nothing to say, until I said, ‘I wonder what will happen next,’ and Mona hit me on the arm but only for fun.

  What happened next was we found out how much cave-person there was in everybody and every time they was 0.5 percent or 1.6 percent Mona’d chuckle and stick a thumb at her chest and say 2.8 percent and grin, and that went on till we looked at mine and it was 4 percent and she shut up bragging.

  ‘Four percent?’ she said. ‘Four? Are you reading that right?’ so I handed her the paper and she said, ‘Huh. Four percent. You cave-kid, you.’

  Along with my results, Stephanie had put in a little note. It weren’t more than a postcard, I guess. But she said how she’d liked visiting with me and hoped she’d see me again some day and then I wondered what kind of life I was gonna have, and would I have people like Stephanie in it and then I was thinking about Bly again so I told Mona I was tired and went to sleep it off in my cabin.

  I read Stephanie’s note again. She ended it like this: ‘Keep staring at the desert, Ash. The answers are always out there, somewhere.’

  And then, ab-so-loot-ly nothing happened.

  Time rolled around, day in and day out, and before anything else came along, I was helping Mona with deliveries a little. In Dolly’s house one day there was her calendar on the wall and it was open to September and there was nothing on it and I had that feeling they call déjà vu and right then I knew I had been in Snowflake for a year.

  And what had I learned?

  A lot, too much. Not enough. But I had learned about getting sick and I had started to learn about dealing with that. I had learned that those folks who think that you can just ‘pull yourself together’ and those folks who think ‘it’s all in your head’ and those folks who think that getting sick is for weak-minded people who don’t wanna be well, heck, they all have no darned clue what they’re talking about.

  In the fight between the body and the mind, I had learned this: the body wins, always. Just think about Bly. And those fine folks who teach that the body should obey the mind have got a surprise coming for ’em, sooner or later, even if that’s on the day they meet their Maker.

  But I had also learned this: that the body and the mind are interconnected, for sure. And I know this sounds weird, but it’s only when one of ’em breaks down that you realize they are two separate things.

  Up until then, I mean the day I arrived in Snowflake, in my eager little scouting through the world’s adventures, it had never occurred to me to feel there was any difference between my mind and my body. They was both just ME. And then my body broke down, and yet my mind kept on running, so for the first time I could see they was separate things. And yet interconnected. You cannot have the one without the other. That’s the funny part. And it was sickness that made me see both how separated and how connected they are. At one and the same time. And I was thinking, god-darn it, life is truly weird and confusing too, at times. And I started to think that the old-time folks in Stephanie’s PhD was right. Only when things go wrong do you learn anything. Like who you are. Like what the world is.

  Now, if I’m sounding a mite over-philosophical for your taste, there’s a reason. There’s a couple reasons. First being that I had been living with a professor of linguistics and philosophy (retired) for a year. That’s enough to mess with anyone’s head. Someone even as dumb-looking as a Tennessee fainting goat might start to philosophize if they went and lived with Mona.

  And the second reason is I am thinking about what happened that autumn.

  It started with good news. Well, what sounded like good news.

  Mona came back from doing the rounds one morning. I had stayed home because I wasn’t feeling great. By then, I didn’t use the chair anymore to get around. I could do a few more jobs about Mona’s place to help out. And on good days I would help with the deliveries, which was nice because I felt like I was actually earning my keep a little, and it took some of the load off of Mona, and though she was mighty strong for a sick fifty-something-year-old, she was still a sick fifty-something-year-old.

  But today was not a good day, so I was set in a red plastic chair looking at the desert, waiting for answers to stroll out of it and drop in my lap.

  Then Mona got home and she said, ‘News! Jenny’s getting married!’ so I said what? and she said, ‘Sure! Jenny and Steve are getting married!’

  So I said huh! that’s cool! and the very next thing I thought was, well, I wonder what changed, and Mona was thinking the same thing because she said, ‘I don’t know the details. Fact is, I shouldn’t know at all, but Sam, down at the grocery store? You know how Sam can’t keep a secret, right? So anyway, Jenny came in a week ago and ordered up a wedding cake and when Sam says “who’s that fer?” Jenny says “it’s for me, dimwit.”’

  ‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Wow. Well, cool.’

  And then Mona and me, we set about wondering what made Jenny change her mind, and how big the wedding was gonna be, and if she’d ordered a cake in Snowflake then that must mean it was gonna happen here and not in San Fran, and so on.

  And then, a few days later, we found out why Jenny was getting married and no, it wasn’t gonna be a big wedding. In fact, Jenny and Steve was getting married by themselves with just two witnesses and they was leaving San Fran for good and coming to live out in Jenny’s place in the Forties. And the reason for all of that was that Jenny was dying. Of cancer, and it was one she’d had before, even while she was in her forties, and now she was still only fifty but they said it had spread. It was all over her body and they couldn’t operate or nothing. Nothing at all.

  They said she just had a few months left, but they was wrong. Actually it was weeks, and Jenny and Steve got married and ate their cake by themselves and lived out her last few days in their place just down the hill from Mona and me. Until the end, when the pain was too bad and they took Jenny into the hospital then and that’s where she died.

  Steve, well, he was a saint.

  With all her money and family, Jenny could have been buried in the city, but instead she’d chosen to go into the ground in Snowflake. And so we all went to her funeral, the second of the year, and that was in the cemetery, a block from the library and two from Snowflake High.

  The cemetery was
as flat as the rest of the land, but there was this one thing about it. It was green. It was all green grass, and they kept that little bit of Snowflake watered, that one place, and it must have took a lot of water but those few acres was the one place in town you could walk on grass. And that was for the dead.

  Steve, he did nothing but love Jenny, all that time, before she died and after she died too. When the funeral was over and after we put her in the ground, we went back to their place which was now just his place and I said to him how sorry I was and he said nothing but ‘thanks, Ash’ and smiled and I asked myself could he see what I was thinking? And wasn’t he thinking the very same thing? Being this: Jenny, why did you wait so long? What on earth were you waiting for? To be with me? To get married? Why did you wanna wait? Because time does not wait.

  Steve said nothing, but I could not stop myself from hearing his voice say it anyway, over and over again. Jenny, what was you waiting for?

  U

  Undiagnosis

  Yes, time kept rolling, even with Bly in the ground and Jenny in the ground. Steve stayed on in her place in the desert for a while. She’d left him everything. She had some family, but she left him everything, and the house in the Forties along with it all. And it was plain she had loved him every bit as much as he loved her, but you tell me, what was the use in that to him now? And the desert got to him. It was a rare human that wanted to live in the raw red desert with sand in your soul, day in and out. So Steve, he stayed a month or two and then he moved back to San Francisco. And he sold the house, and since it was a house that was good for folks with MCS, he sold it to one. Me. For one dollar.

  Now, a cabin is one thing, but a house is another. And Steve was trying to give me a house, but he said it wasn’t a gift, legal-wise, if I paid for it, so he insisted on having one US dollar in return. He said it was what Jenny would have wanted, he said she’d left him more than enough money anyhow, he said he’d already been a rich man, given how he was a lawyer. He said he oughta share some of his good fortune. So I said why can’t I just rent it from you? A dollar a week? But he said he was sorry but it was too hard for him to keep. On account of how he missed Jenny. And I argued and I argued with him but he wouldn’t take no as an answer, and everyone else was on his team, and in the end I accepted, and I bought his house for a dollar, and I moved in.