Amy Falls Down (10 page)

Now she surfed her latest title entries.

“Malignant Twinkle”

“You’re That Lady”

“Shadow”

“Right Now”

“You’re Funny”

“A Riot of Tasteful Color”

“Birdbaths”

“A Rigorous Admissions Process”

“Blushing in the Dark”

And there it was.

She had written it down when badly frightened, desperate to distract herself with rage. Even if she hadn’t remembered writing it, the shiny pencil grooves would have given it away, summoned up antiseptic scent, ugly light, blue curtains, the soft moans and harsh laughter of strangers, on the day they found out he was dying. Summoned up in turn a deeper memory, that demented old woman down the hall from Max’s last room, shrieking for her mama while they tried to cut her fingernails. The suffering place. Fear so sharp and clean it was beautiful. What if you wake up one day and you’re old and your life is almost over, and you realize all you could have had?

Amy sat back down at her computer, opened up a fresh Word file, named it “Shadow,” and began to write.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Walkies

Over the next three weeks, Amy wrote at what was for her a white heat, finishing one story and immediately beginning another. She had never before focused so deeply. Even in her youth, a good writing day produced at most a page and a half. When not working or writing, she walked Alphonse, or tried to, up and down the mild gradients of nearby streets. Dickens got his inspiration from nocturnal walks down the smoky byways of Manchester; Amy tried walking at midnight, risking the alarm of all the fenced dogs in the neighborhood, as well as Alphonse, who just wanted to go to sleep. Alphonse hated walkies. Amy had once loved to walk, before her muscles began to atrophy and her joints to sing and not in a pleasant way. But the exercise cleared her head, fed it in some mysterious way, so that when they got back home, she would sit at the computer for another hour or two, mostly thinking.

Amy’s nocturnal strolls ended the night they encountered a pack of coyotes. Single coyotes weren’t unusual in the neighborhood—they sometimes strolled through Amy’s front yard at high noon—but on this occasion, she and Alphonse rounded a corner and came upon five of them standing close together, their ears straight up, their eyes bright with hunger. They spread out slowly in a semicircle around her, not blocking an exit, which seemed odd until she remembered that running away was supposed to be the worst thing you could do under the circumstances. They wanted her and her morsel to run away. Fat chance of that, thought Amy; neither of them had run anywhere for years. Alphonse stood close beside her and growled low, bristling. Amy wasn’t afraid for herself: clearly they were focused on Alphonse, who probably looked like a family banquet and was no threat to them except in his own mind. Amy straddled the basset, raised her hands high and began to wave broadly, stiff-armed, making herself as large as possible, which, she had read, was the thing to do when confronted by carnivorous mammals. Two of the coyotes actually sat down to watch, as though she and Alphonse were doing dinner and a show. She tried slowly backing away but couldn’t get Alphonse to budge. Of all the times to be stalwart. She would have to make some noise.

Not for the first time, Amy felt the real pull between survival and social embarrassment. Almost as desperate to avoid waking her neighbors as she was not to be savaged, she whispered, as loud as she could, “Buzz off!! Get lost!!” Their ears twitched with interest, just like a dog’s, but they didn’t buzz off. Instead, they moved closer, lazily, as though they had all the time in the world. They moved like pool hall toughs in the old movies, ambling toward their target. It was time to break somebody’s thumbs. She waved and whispered again, this time putting some throat into it, but not enough to stop them. She was going to have to shout.

At just this moment, all the neighborhood dogs, who shared keen hearing with the coyotes if not keen pack instincts, went crazy. The ones who were outdoors awoke and threw themselves against their fences; inside sleeping houses, little yipping dogs scrabbled at windows. One of the coyotes, the smallest, mangiest one, joined them, howling to its cousins, and the barks turned to howls in response, building a magnificent chorus. Alphonse threw back his head and bellowed, his basset howl low and gravelly.
Aroooo.
The coyote pack did not exactly abandon the hunt but paused in their tracks as if to boost the treble, perhaps in response to Alphonse’s bass notes. The animals were singing. The chorus was improvised but polyphonic, true music, and in that music Amy could hear joy and longing in equal parts. For a moment all thought was banished. This was nirvana for Amy. Then she heard footsteps behind her, and Carl Ward from across the street, a nice guy who managed the local Arby’s and hunted elk every winter, was at her side with a loaded rifle which he fired once into the air, and the coyotes melted into the darkness at the top of the hill. “Beautiful,” he said. She knew he meant the song.

Amy was too good a neighbor to ever repeat the midnight stroll, but this one time was enough to start her on something new. Now she had three stories going at once. She felt like a conduit. Not that characters and plots were pouring out of her—this had never happened and never would—but she had moments now, almost daily, of hyperawareness, as though she could see the web of delicate causal filaments all around her, radiating out into the neighboring streets and farther into the world. You turn a corner and beasts break into arias, gunfire erupts, waking a hundred families, starting a hundred different conversations. You crack your head open and three thousand miles away a stranger with Asperger’s jump-starts your career.

Causation was intrinsic to the engines of plot; and because plot had never been her strong point, she had created narrative pull in her stories and novels through character, which worked well enough but made for slow movement.
Something has to happen,
her publisher would politely suggest.
Readers expect it
. Until now, for Amy, a glacial change in a character’s perspective, a tiny realization of some portion of the truth, had been, more often than not, the thing that happened in her fiction: the change that made the story worth telling. She had thought this was part of her diehard aesthetic, even though her favorite novelists—Dickens, Melville, Tolstoy—hardly confined themselves to tiny snags in the fabric of life. Now she began to suspect that she had just been writing what she knew, which was all interior. Until she hit her head on the birdbath and all hell broke loose.

*   *   *

Maxine called. “What do you think?” she asked.

“About what?”

“The
Enlightenment
piece. Carmen Calliostro. My god, you didn’t read it?”

“I’ve been busy.”
Enlightenment
was an online rag, more bookish than
Salon,
less huffy than the
Huffington Post
. Amy’s online reading was mostly confined to the
Onion
.

“Calliostro did eight paragraphs on you. Look it up.”

“Maxine,” said Amy, “I’m writing again.” She felt like a fool sharing this with anybody.

“Fabulous!”

“It’s stories, Maxine.” Amy held the receiver away from her ear. She could have heard Maxine’s obscenities from across the room. “Stories, Maxine,” she yelled back. “Live with it. At least I’m writing.”

“How am I supposed to sell stories? Read the thing.” Maxine hung up.

Carmen Calliostro’s thing was titled “Bionic Leg.” In keeping with the standards of modern journalism, most of it was about Carmen Calliostro. She began with a yellowed verbal snapshot of her own lithe undergraduate form (litheness could be deduced from her byline sketch) supine on a sward in Ithaca (Carmen was way too shy to come out and say Cornell), thumbing through the stories in
Monstrous Women
and “falling in love with words for the very first time.” Next came a whirlwind tour of her literary education, during which she confessed (actually using the verb “confess”) to throwing Amy over in favor of a succession of trendier writers. “I was embarrassed,” she said, dimpling verbally, “to have been seduced by writing so old-fashioned. It was the fiction writer’s mission, I was sure, to intuit and interpret the spirit of the times. Amy Gallup was old news: the least zeitgeisty of writers.” (Apparently Carmen’s love affair with words had ended badly.)

“I was wrong,” she wrote, in a dramatic one-sentence paragraph.

Holly Antoon’s story, upon which Carmen stumbled in some unexplained way (Amy guessed at a Munster connection), reawakened her interest in Amy’s fiction. After pausing to note that Antoon reminded her of her own girlish self (over the moon with the English lexicon?), Carmen finally—practically at the last minute—arrived at her ostensible subject. Like Maxine and the rest, she assumed without reflection that Amy had been in full charge of her own faculties during the interview and had invested every line of dialogue with cunning foresight. Like Antoon, she was crazy about the brilliant “going off road” metaphor, but what really knocked her out was the bionic leg. Aside from the gut-busting hilarity of the “meta-joke,” she was delighted by Amy’s “deliberate use of a lie to celebrate the über-truth of fiction.”

What an idiot.

Amy was still laughing when she got Maxine on the phone. “That’s two minutes out of my life that I’m not going to get back,” she said, “but it is pretty funny.”

“You don’t get it. This is how it starts.”

“The apocalypse?”

“I got three emails this morning. Nothing solid yet, but a feeler from NPR. I’ve got a call in to Lex. I’ll get back to you. Just keep writing, and send me whatever you got.”

“I thought you couldn’t sell stories.”

“Sure I can. I don’t want to is all. And hey, maybe stories aren’t such a bad way to go right now. I got some ideas. See ya.”

*   *   *

That day she finished a second story. She now had two to offer Maxine: “Shadow” and an untitled one about a fatal bus plunge. A group of seniors, on their way to a production of
Our Town
at the Lamb’s Players Theater on the island of Coronado, swerves to avoid a Weber grille in the westbound right lane of the Coronado Bridge and plunges into San Diego Bay. A young reporter for the
U-T
begins a series of investigative pieces on the lives of the twelve passengers and driver, detailing how each one of them happened to be on that bus on that day. The series starts out poorly, every observation a cliché, but deepens as it goes and its author begins to see her subjects as complex beings, each the product of an unlikely train of events. In her last piece, titled “What It All Means,” she rises to a level of analysis and passion that frightens and excites her. It all means absolutely nothing, she writes, beyond the catastrophic loss of thirteen living souls and the grief of those who mourn them. The fatal accident was horrible and stupid. This sets off a firestorm of calls and letters from Christians, and the reporter is canned.

Amy wasn’t crazy about the story. First, she never wrote allegories. For another thing, it wasn’t even her allegory. Surely she wasn’t the first writer to riff on
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
which was itself a sort of riff. Since Thornton Wilder had gotten there first, the story was hardly necessary. The third-person narrative voice was impassive, authoritative, and rather off-putting, at least to Amy. And it was less a story than a sketch for something larger, like a screenplay. She didn’t do screenplays. All in all, she feared it was a cheap shot. But it had practically written itself, which meant that her subconscious was largely responsible, and she was inclined, as always, to trust the director.

“Shadow” might be the best story she had ever written, or the worst. It was certainly close to the bone, scary to write. After Max died, she had for twenty years refused to consider a direct fictional assault on that topic, and since all other topics paled, she had refused to consider anything else. But something had changed. Although she would never use
his
experience, however deeply imagined, in a story, she was ready now to use her own. His death belonged to him; her grief was hers to use or abuse. An agnostic man learns that his wife is dying. She is still recovering from surgery, unaware of the news. He stumbles into the hospital chapel and down through a series of craven prayers. As he prays he regards himself with loathing, first at his own hypocrisy, and then at his inability to ignore his self-aware natterings and focus on the task at hand, which is nothing less than the production of a miracle from the common dirt of need. If he could just focus cleanly on this task he might affect her fate. The chapel, formerly brightened by sunlight streaming through a high round stained-glass window, suddenly darkens, prompting his armor to fall away, and his need rises, shining, powerful, too powerful, piercing the walls around him, and for what seems like endless time he sees his own puny beacon engulfed by the brilliance of constellations, swallowed up in freezing clouds of gas and dust, clouds with terrible shapes, crab, rearing horse, mutant eagle. Outside the hospital, the sun emerges from a much smaller cloud, the chapel fills again with light. Next to him, an old woman fishes in her purse, hands him a tract from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Bless you,” she says. Under the picture of a naked old man suffering on his knees, the question, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” He waits for her to leave and then places the tract on the seat behind him. He sees that others have come into the room, each sitting alone. In their faces and the set of their shoulders he can see they are all like him, waist-deep in a river of suffering. He has never seen this river before, but he knows it is as real and ordinary as the chapel itself. Dust dances in the sunbeams.

Maxine was really going to hate these stories. Amy attached them both to an email and clicked
Send
.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Hypothetical Promises

After some weeks, Maxine called. “KPBS-FM wants an interview.” KPBS was the San Diego public radio station.